Jeff Likes To Rant

Live Free or Die

2009-06-18T15:57:00.000-04:00

As we passed through New Hampshire today on the way from Maine to Essex Junction, I saw the great welcome sign that reads, “Welcome to New Hamphire: Live Free or Die”. This is a quote from a Revolutionary War New Hampshire resident and Continental Army General John Stark. For a reunion on a Vermont battlefield years after the war, the entire quote read, “Live Fee or Die: Death is not the worst of Evils”.

Compare and contrast with the prior administrations motto, “Be afraid of Dying. Damn the Constitution, full speed ahead!”

Anyway, the contrast was stunning and I can only be hopeful that the old American spirit will live to fight another day. Raise my chance of dying before reducing my liberties Mr. President. We were once the land of the free.

Liberal Media Bias. What’s the motive?

2009-06-17T09:51:00.000-04:00

Okay, we all watch enough cop shows to know that without a motive, there’s no case. So why is it that the Right Wing Echo ChamberTM gets away with calling, oh, let’s say NBC biased to the left? What possible motive could General Electric, parent of NBC and paragon of all that’s free market capitalism, have to lean left? Did Jeffrey Immelt leave a commune to run the conglomerate? Before him, does anyone really think Jack Welch had a liberal bias? What possible fucking evidence is there for such a nitwit conclusion that apparently 20-25% of the nation has taken to heart? GE exists for one thing and one thing only. Profits. That and number one or two position in an industry, but no-fucking-where is there anything to motivate a liberal bias. To the contrary, one would expect the opposite.

Ever hear an interview with Ted Turner? Other than marrying (briefly) Jane Fonda, there isn’t a liberal bone in his body. Yes the Right gets away with calling CNN the “Clinton News Network”. Huh? No motive, no case.

As Steve Colbert so wondrously put it, “The truth has a known liberal bias.”

Democracy in Iran

2009-06-15T16:39:00.002-04:00

Jeez, I was looking forward to a little loosening of the screws in Iran, when the incumbent pulls off a rigged election. Holy crap! It’s like the The Gang That Couldn’t Vote Straight. Okay, how’s this on the smell test- the Mousavi vote in his hometown was under 30%. I’mADinnerJacket got something like 85% in his. Things that make you go “huh?” Next somebody managed to hand count all them millions of ballots and declare a victor 2 hours after the polls close. How?

I knew a lot of Persians (as I believe most Iranians prefer to be called) in college, before and after the last revolution. Though they were mostly kids of Shah employees, they had great things to say about their country and it’s millennia of history. Iran is an educated and Western leaning enough country that has it’s young coming up connected to the world, and dying for a little freedom. Before 1979, though the Shah was a thug, Teheran was a center of scholarship and (some) Western ideals. It’s been 30 years since a revolution turned Iran into an Islamic Republic; maybe the next generation can turn it into a democratic one this time.

Mousavi is out of the same mold as the Dinner Jacket, but progress, especially women’s rights, could have a chance under him. The current leader is definitely a nut job, so this thing really needs to be corrected before Israel pulls a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran’s nuke sites. Holy crap! Can you imagine the violence that would be unleashed against not just Israel, but her enabler, the good old US of A?

It’s terrifying, but I can’t take my eyes off it.

Death by Conservatism

2009-06-11T10:45:00.000-04:00

Sadly, we’ve seen two slayings recently for which the blame can be laid at the feet of the right wing punditry and the Republican Party. A security guard at the Holocaust Museum was gunned down by an 88-year-old White Supremacist. Last week, an abortion provider was shot at his church. Pro-life, indeed.

If you listen to the likes of Sean, Rush, et al., you’d pretty much have to take the job of killing abortion as a God given directive. If you really believe the guy killed 60,000 human beings rather than zygote clusters of cells, then it probably makes sense in your twisted little mind. As I’ve said, ad nauseum, if abortion is so damned un-Christian, why didn’t the Big Guy let us know? Abortion wasn’t invented in 1973 by Democrats, no matter what the fat man on the radio says.

The anti-Semitic basis for raiding a museum has a powerful basis in the Republican Party with a big ironic twist that most people miss. The Religious Right supports Israel only because it has a big role in “the end of days”. That’s when all the Jews get sent to hell and the “elect” ascend to heaven. Great. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

How bad can it get?

2009-06-01T17:05:00.001-04:00

So, I was driving up to Camden to visit a friend who’d had a stroke (get better Bill) with Rick from lowernine.org, and as we do, we spent most of the drive vilifying, excoriating and bloviating about whatever a couple of liberal bigmouths go on about. Usually, I’m the pessimist in the room when it comes to the economy, but two years of living for the most part in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward have convinced him we’re headed for Mad Max, rather than the The Grapes of Wrath that I’m expecting. The Lower Ninth Ward looks like a disaster scene after all these years. So few homes repaired, no retail, no public transportation, no nothing. Could we see a lot more of this, only man created everywhere else? Rick certainly thinks so.

Back here in the Green Zone, I keep reading horrible statistics, but see and hear very little about people getting all medieval on someone’s ass. I would have thought by now there’d be militias or tent cities or stockbroker massacres or something, but so far it’s all quiet on the Eastern Front.

Listening to the Assclown Twins, Sean and Rush, you’d think our current Commander in Chief was Karl Marx. Remember Dick Cheney’s famous “deficits don’t matter”? Well somehow, under President Obama, they are the greatest threat since “islamofacism”, to use one of the most historically ignorant terms ever invented.

Anyway, it’s really sounding like the Right Wing Pundrity is just asking some screw loose possessing nut to take a shot at POTUS. Great. The only good news is the Repubs would end up without 10 seats in the Senate and 50 in the House given the backlash. And for Dog’s sake, who wants Joe Biden for President?

Enough of this random post.

Sotomayor and the RightWingHateMachineTM

2009-05-29T17:15:00.001-04:00

This should a rich vein to mine through the summer. I really thought for a minute there that the lowest they could sink would be to call someone second in here class at Princeton “stooped”. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard on Bill Bennett’s radio show actually tried to imply that she got into Princeton through Affirmative Action, so her degree means nothing. Number 2 at Princeton? Is anyone swallowing this except a few blowhards and the ignorant poor white trash that needs an explanation that fits their worldview and tells them why some Puerto Rican is doing better than them. Could it be the lack of education? Nope. Obviously dropping out of high school and knocking up your girlfriend was a great career move, but “liberal elites” are trying to give away your richly deserved seat on the Supreme Court to some spic in an act of reverse racism. Such injustice.

Speaking as a rich, white, middle aged American Neo-Socialist the GOP does NOT have my sympathies, but we really need a two party system. G. Gordon Liddy (a convicted felon) actually said on his radio show “What if she’s menstruating during an important conference?” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!!! I hadn’t heard that one since the 70’s!

So if you insult and piss off the slightly more than half of the US electorate who vote (women) and the fastest growing minority (Latino) while actively telling Republican moderates to get the hell out (Susan Collins & Olympia Snowe) while you’re cling to a tenuous 40 seats in the Senate, you’re probably not going to ascend to the majority anytime soon.

Further Disabling Republicans

2009-05-27T14:56:00.002-04:00

So, the Republicans were basically plotting strategies to derail anyone at all that President Obama might want to nominate to the SCOTUS. It is SO obvious that when Judge Sotomayor was announced as the candidate that the party’s PR machine just wanted to blastmail the base, “Dumb Spic Bitch!” Of course, they are still trying to figure out how to use their (racist) base, and not look like complete assclowns to the emerging generations that have no time for that happy horseshit. Honest to Dog, the leaked talking memos from the Rethuglicans and Talibangelists had at their core the idea that Sonia Sotomayor was somehow intellectually not up to the task.

Rove repeated it, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” So did Fox News, “not the smartest.” Um, do these people have any idea how freaking bright you have to be to graduate second in your class at Princeton? Karl Rove doesn’t even have a college degree! Rush Limbaugh dropped out of High School. She edited the Law Review at Yale. And she did all this growing up as a poor Puerto Rican immigrant in the Bronx who spoke no English till age nine. Not intellectually strong coming from a dropout. Nice move, Karl.

Think GWB would have made it to Yale and Harvard with that pedigree and his intellect? I think not. They just want to play the race card so badly, and they can’t figure out to do it and not lose a couple of generations of voters.

Good vs. Evil

2009-05-24T13:48:00.002-04:00

So, is it just me or did the Cheney/Obama damn near consecutive speech thing look like Light vs. Dark? Cheney with that scowl and grinding voice selling all fear, all the time, everyone be very afraid as only I can protect you. Obama with another reasoned, well spoken, thoughtful take on things. I’m so tired of the whole fear thing. And when the hell did it become the Presidents number one job to “protect” us? This from the enemies of the “nanny state”? I thought it was protecting the Constitution. Silly fucking me.

We’ve seen more of Cheney than we did when he was in office, and it’s like he’s letting us know that the only reason the second GWB term wasn’t even worse (hard to imagine), is because people started listening to Condi more than him. My Dog, what a troll.

It’s especially funny in light of having actually watched both speeches, how the RightWingMedia machine could try to spin this as Obama is whining and Cheney is wise. How do you put “9/11” 27 times into a 20 minute speech, and then say, “We don’t want to dwell on the past”? Still, the thugs on the right offer headlines like “Cheney's Compelling, Human Speech Was Better Than Obama's Boring Legal Seminar” (US News).

Hannity went on the air gushing about what an all American Cheney is and what a show of gratitude we owe him for protecting us AFTER 9/11, but wait. Who was in charge on 9/11? None other than Monkey Boy and Darth Vader. How that smug jackass can say, “To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaeda terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.” Huh? On your watch more Americans BY FAR were killed by terrorists a month after you got a briefing headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” that detailed a plan to use airliners.

Let me guess. You couldn’t pursue it because Clinton thought it was important, but your ideological purity required ABC. Anything But Clinton. 3,000 Americans dead in the US and thousands more in Iraq and Afghanistan, cuz you had to be ideologically pure.

Thanks a lot, asshole.

Republican Self-Immolation

2009-05-21T11:01:00.001-04:00

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for them, until you remember how much they screwed over this country and its’ people. If you missed it, here’s a great clip of Jesse Ventura taking down Sean Hannity. My favorite part is when a straight-faced Sean claims that Bush left America in better shape than he inherited it. Unfreakingbelievable.

Everything I’ve heard from any right wing pundit, talking head or guest on The View says the same thing, “We need to be true to our conservative roots and stop acting like Democrats Lite.” You can’t make this shit up. It’s also hilarious when they try to distance themselves from George W. Bush, whom they backed with Messianic fever for both terms. I actually heard one on NPR yesterday that people had somehow come to confuse “conservative” with “republican”. Really? Ya think so? How the hell could that happen?

Maybe we’ll see the right try to start a national Conservative Party that would be ideologically to the right of the Republicans. I’d donate right up to the legal limit to get that off the ground and watch them crumble into tiny splinters (to mix a metaphor) and into complete ineffectiveness so they would stop ruining my country.

I was in Costa Rica with my nephew Aaron and his wife Carla, and we were just being amazed at how clean, prosperous, healthy and well educated the country is. They stopped having a military in 1948; now THAT’S progressive. Neighboring Nicaragua has a GDP per capita of $2,900, Guatemala $5,200, and Costa Rica $11,600. Carla made the comment that Costa Rica is what happens when educated Liberals run a country. Wouldn’t it be nice to put the US through the same process?

Let me dream, okay?

Vote Right, Vote White

2009-05-19T14:29:00.002-04:00

Thanks Zirgar.

Stolen Flat Out

2009-05-16T16:10:00.000-04:00

I usually like Bob Cesca over at HuffPo, but he outdid himself with this quote. Apparently Jess Ventura was heard to say, “You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

Priceless. For our younger reader, Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family in a pretty horrific late 1960’s killing spree. I’m pretty sure Cheney wasn’t involved, but if he admits it? I dunno.

US Socialists: Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines

2009-05-15T16:18:00.000-04:00

You know, the US military basically makes up the largest socialist institution in the country. Everything from glasses to health care to training to education is paid for by the government, and it seems to work well. How the hell can the Right be so rah rah about the military being so great and socialism so wrong when it’s practically the same thing? Practically every decision is government supplied. Every need is government supplied. It all somehow manages to work out well, being run by the same government that the righties don’t want to trust with their health care, education or damn near anything other than cops and soldiers.

Sheesh.

Health Care and the Lunatic Right

2009-05-14T16:19:00.000-04:00

Okay, if you love your health insurance company, raise your hand. No one? Anyone? Huh. I guess people aren’t happy with their health insurance companies. After all, their incentive is to get as much of your money as possible and pay out as little of it as possible. How is this a recipe for happy healthy outcomes? It isn’t.

And yet, the assclowns of the Republican Party, out of intense ideological purity, insist that the worst thing that could happen would be for the government to cover health care for all Americans in a single payer system. I think they just might be on the wrong side of history (again).

Basically, on talk radio, they say things like you’ll be on a waiting list for years, no one will go to med school, government bureaucrats will make your medical decisions and a whole lot of other nonsense. One problem; the rest of the developed world does it that way, and for way less money and with way better results. Someone on NPR yesterday offered this way to investigate if it works. Take your phone number and add a Canadian area code. Call and ask how they like their healthcare system. Is that enough for you?

We spend more on health care and live less long than most developed countries. How about we get off of the ideological bullshit express and do the right thing? The entire health insurance industry is nothing but a bloodsucking industry taking our dollars and limiting our access to healthcare. Would taxes go up? Yes, but expenses (at least to the health insurance oligarchy) would go down. What’s to hate? This is a genuine citizens’ vs. big business issue and for Dog’s sake let’s get it right this time.

The Underlying Financial Problem

2009-05-10T17:04:00.003-04:00

While there’s plenty of blame to go around as to why are in so much trouble financially, the underlying time bomb that overshadows the others by a mile is the unregulated market for credit default swaps or CDS’s. Today on NPR, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto came up with a number nearly twice the size of the one I was using. These unregulated private deals are thought by him to total about $1.2 quadrillion. US$1,200,000,000,000,000.00. There isn’t that much money in the world. The world economy is, well, smaller than that. Like 4% of it; let’s use the World Banks figure of $48 trillion. The liabilities out there are worth a quarter century of total global output. Needless to say, a trillion here and a trillion there will not correct this massive house of cards.

The graphic above shows what a quadrillion pennies would look like. Multiple by 120, and that's the debt we're talking.

Dog help us.

National Defense

2009-05-10T09:15:00.000-04:00

So it turns out that the right wing talk radio machine is aflame over the Prez’s plan to look at cutting some fat from the half trillion-dollar “defense” budget. Other than 1812, 1941 and 2001 we’ve really been more about offense than defense, but whatever. And other than WWII, when is the last time things turned out to be a big win? Korea? Tie. Viet Nam? Loss. Mogadishu? Lebanon? Iraq? Afghanistan?

Anyway, the right claims that any cuts to “defense” make us more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Huh? How the hell does an F-22 keep terrorists out? Aircraft carriers? Nuclear subs? The US spends more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined. Can you say overkill? The runners up, China and Russia? We spend 18 times what they do. 18 times. Can you say corporate welfare for the military industrial complex?

We can’t afford freaking health care, but missile frigates by the dozens are terrific. To use the military parlance, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?” If I hear Sean Hannity say one more time, “He’s making an attack inevitable by slashing our military!” I’m gonna have to get all medieval on his ass.

Shouting Into The Closet

2009-05-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

Just when you think it can’t get anymore ridiculous, the right wing punditry steps on Obama for ordering a cheeseburger and asking for “spicy mustard, maybe Dijon” rather than good old American ketchup. I kid you not. Hannity, Limbaugh and Ingraham all checked in on this one. There are two particularly funny parts of this. Obviously, the problem is that Dijon is in France, the right wing’s idea of the anti-America. (Thanks again for saving our bacon in the American Revolution.) Grey Poupon is, and has always been, a product of Kraft, a company as American as, well, mustard. Anyone who’s ever been to Chicago knows that mustard is the condiment of choice and if you ask for ketchup, you’d better be under twelve. So it’s come to this; the best the vast right wing conspiracy can come up with is his choice of burger topping?

Holy crap! It’s worse than even I thought!

More Madness from the Right

2009-05-08T09:31:00.002-04:00

These people just won’t get a clue to save their lives. How many ways can you call the President “radical” before realizing that he is both the elected leader and wildly popular? How can a majority be rationally called “radical”? I return again to the “socialist” label than conservative pundits use at their peril. I know a lot of people who’d pay more in taxes to avoid student loans and health insurance nightmares. The USSR has been gone for decades, so the “commie” label just doesn’t scare like it used to. Um, let’s see, helping the poor? Check. Fairness? Check. Education for all? Check. Affordable healthcare for all? Check. I can’t tell whether that’s more Jesus or Marx. Oh well. That’s what we get for raising a generation of thoughtful and empathetic young adults. They voted him in and just might not be the biggest fans of the selfish, Ayn Randian right wing Republican Party.

Libertarian Paradise

2009-05-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

2009-05-06T14:27:00.002-04:00

Okay, so the right really hates taxes. Somehow borrowing trillions from the Chinese is better than taxing Americans for American stuff. Hmmm. How does that scale? Anyway, they really don’t want anyone anywhere ever paying taxes, and somehow that leads to a better future. Don’t know about you, but I like paved roads, police protection, regulation of food safety, zoning and a host of other things our taxes buy us. I think we could shrink the military budget by 75% and not miss a step, but I digress.

A favorite of the right and especially Libertarians is the so-called “fair tax”.

The idea is that transactions are taxed, rather than earnings or income. It’s a consumption tax. Uh huh. This is going to work. How about if I sell a car to a relative (which I just did). Are we expected to cough up a tax? What if I don’t? What about yard sales? Barter? Gun shows? I can’t imagine a more intrusive invasion of privacy than checking up on all personal transactions. When I was 29, my dad gave me $20,000. When I was 36, I bought him a $20,000 Miata. Was that a taxable transaction? What if I donated $30,000 to the SAAB dealership and coincidentally they donated a car to me. Is that taxable? The rate they presume for this scheme is 23%, so my dealing with the SAAB dealer would save me almost $7,000. As much effort as is spent on tax avoidance now, one could only imagine the kind of scams that would proliferate under a “fair tax”. I honestly think these right wing assclowns want the US government to simply collapse to fit into their virulently anti-tax, anti-government agenda.

Thanks Dog the Republicans are down to one in five Americans.

Just a quilt I made

2009-05-05T18:51:00.002-04:00

Delusional Republicans

2009-05-04T10:11:00.000-04:00

This just in. The Republican Party can now be announced clinically insane. In an effort to invigorate the party they are turning to Bush administration insiders for guidance. Friday, they’re having a workshop for Republican press secretaries, and Bush alums are the instructors. Why not bring back Typhoid Mary to deal with swine flu? These people are so delusional about what the last eight years meant to America that they are turning to “battle tested” Bush alums for guidance going forward.

These people actually still manage to believe that the problem is getting out the word on what they stand for. I’m pretty sure Americans got a pretty good idea of what they stand for after eight years of Republican rule under the Boy King. “No, no! That wasn’t real conservatism!” Um, why didn’t you mention that at the time, rather than letting the economy go down in flames before discovering you needed a do over?

The evidence is all there. In spite of today’s lamenting of Obama’s deficits, the right gladly followed Bush into a trillion dollar mistake in Iraq, a trillion in tax cuts for the rich (I pay zero federal taxes) and an unprecedented run up in debt. Remember the outcry from conservatives about the massive overspending? Neither do I. Just another pile of hypocrisy from a party used to shoving it down willing dupes throats. At least now, some of the dupes seem to be reconsidering.

Political Stance and Luck

2009-05-03T16:10:00.000-04:00

I read an interesting bit on HuffPo today that confirmed a prejudice of mine. The author stated that you could guess a new acquaintance’s political views by asking what role luck had played in his or her life. If they say “none” they are almost certainly very conservative. “Outliers” is a book newly published that purports that even the great titans of industry or athletes or whatever owe much of their success to luck, circumstances and other people who played pivotal roles. Conservatives tend to believe that both the rich and the poor deserve it.

I’ve probably said 1,000 times to conservatives, “Bill Gates if born in 6th century Somalia wouldn’t have survived to adolescence.” That generally gets me a dumb look.

If you believe that everything you have or don’t have in life is due to hard work and initiative then naturally you won’t have much use for social justice, not to mention feeding, sheltering or educating the poor. Ironically a high proportion of these people are evangelical Christians who apparently never read their own book. I just wish for one super power; the ability to turn every wealthy American into a 6 year old in Darfur for a year, and let them retain the memory when returned to their previous lives. I’d like to think some minds would be changed. Anyone who tells me they had the wisdom and insight to be born to white parents in late 20th century who valued education and hard work can kiss my ass.

What ever happened to “there but for the grace of god go I”?

Hypocracy, Misogyny, Racism on the Right

2009-05-03T13:52:00.001-04:00

So the Southern Strategy stopped being so damned effective over the last few years, and some Republicans actually noticed. Two recent moves are especially hilarious. To make it seem like they aren’t generally sexists, the Republicans put a women on the ticket. With typical ham handedness and tone deafness, they picked Caribou Barbie, an insult to any thinking woman out there who saw right through their cynical ploy. But now they’re stuck with her. And you know their increasingly cretinous base will make her a contender in 2012. And she stands zero chance of winning in the general election.

Next, to counter four decades of perceived (and actual) racism and perhaps dull the pain of a popular, though rather dark hued for their tastes, Democratic President, they put Michael Steele in change of the Republican National Committee. Somehow they managed to forget that the guy running the RNC actually gets to make decisions and might even speak to the press. They also managed to forget that African-American Republicans tend to have, shall we say, quirks? It takes a lot of self-loathing or just plain confused thinking for a black man to work for the party that has won elections by yelling “Nigger!” since the 1960’s.

Anyway, now that Mr. Steele has stated a few opinions that stray from the ideological party line, they’re calling for his scalp. There are calls for the Republican Party to stop funding their own national committee. So now they get the added bonus of beating up on the Negro in the house. That’ll go over big in the hip-hop culture that is young America.

If they hadn’t so trashed this country that I love, you could almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

Republican Solution to Drowning? Add Weights.

2009-05-02T15:56:00.004-04:00

Hanging out near Mercersburg, Pennsyltucky, where nephew Josh will attend boarding school in the fall. Beautiful campus, great teaching staff, smart students; I’m jealous!

So anyway, just when the Republican Party seems to be careening into irrelevancy, they go and reinforce their racist cred and target the fastest growing demographic in the US of A. Michelle Malkin can’t stop saying, “I told you so. Dirty Mexicans are infecting us!” She’s getting an amen from Sean and Rush and Anne and Laura and all the other usual bullies. Besides being patently false (the infections apparently were in Americans who had traveled to Mexico) it’s extremely insulting to Latinos, the only group that could make Republicans relevant again. Why do these people hate hard working, family oriented Catholics? It makes no sense to me, but then again, racism is very deeply ingrained in the Republican Party, and requires very little logic. First generation Korean-American Michelle fails to see the irony in her anti-immigrant screeds. Unbelievable.

So, basically the decades of one party rule that Karl Rove envisioned looks about as silly as the Thousand Year Reich. Every election cycle, more Republican (angry, old, white, Southern) are dying, while the young voters coming up are overwhelmingly Democrats. Good riddance to bad beliefs, bad policy and bad governance.

Let’s look at a few of the pointless issues muddying the minds of listeners to right wing talk radio.

1. Obama is spending more than anyone ever!
Actually he inherited a $10 trillion deficit that included tax cuts for the rich (I pay zero federal taxes) and an unnecessary war. At least Obama wants to spend it on us.

2. This is tyrrany!
Um, I wanted to vote in November, but jack booted thugs from the Democratic Party kept me from the polls! Oh wait. No they didn’t. It’s not called “tyranny”. It’s called “losing”.

3. He’s trying to make us socialists by nationalizing the companies!
Actually, the banks and auto companies came to the government, not the other way around.

4. He wasn’t born in America!
This one slays me. How did his birth announcement make the Honolulu newspaper the next day?

I think if one spends an hour with Diane Rehm and an hour with Hannity or Limbaugh, it would be really, really hard to say they were all anywhere near balanced. Diane usually has conservative guests who are allowed to speak their minds without interruption. I have never heard her put down or shut off a guest. Sean? Yell them down. Rush? Never get past the screener.

The Republicans and their media pals are killing their party.

Good.

Off to Pennsylvania

2009-05-01T10:00:00.003-04:00

Waiting in the rain for it to stop so we can break camp and move another step closer to Maine, I ponder Obama’s state of mind. Remembering the Onion headline before the Inauguration (“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”), it’s hard to imagine worse circumstances under which to govern. Two wars, economic collapse, pandemic, sheesh. All we need are locusts, boils and death of the firstborn.

Anyway, I think he’s doing a great job, especially under current circumstances. His continuing popularity is encouraging too, but (as both my readers know) I expect the economic malaise to last for much of a decade, and I fear how patient people will be as the reality sinks in.

The self-immolation of the Republican Party is sort of disturbing and fascinating, like a car wreck. As the angry southern white racists die off and the hip-hop loving kids come of age, the Southern Strategy comes to a grinding halt, and the response from most of the party is to get rid of the moderates. Oh my. Breathtaking hubris has defined this party for decades now, and OMG, it’s coming home to roost.

There was a great piece in the NY Times last year about how there are two approaches to family and childrearing and how they are reflected in party affiliation; one is the strong Dad demanding good behavior, with corporal punishment for wrongdoing, and the other is the supporting, nurturing family that protects and supports the kids. I grew up in the former in a staunchly Republican family, so I bought into this theory pretty easily. I had friends whose parents were much more relaxed and supportive, and, go figure, the parents were generally Democrats.

Listening to Limbaugh, et al, they seem to be saying that the cure for the child that ran away is to beat the remaining kids that much more harshly. We’ll see how that works out.

Chrysler Goes Broke

2009-04-30T10:22:00.000-04:00

Not that long ago, it was unimaginable to most Americans that Chrystler would go under, never mind GM, which only hasn’t filed for bankruptcy yet. My family gave up on American cars in the mid-70’s, and except for trucks, I’ve gone overseas for cars. Here’s an interesting exercise; cars I’ve bought in my life.
9 Saabs, 2 Porsches, 2 Suburbans, 1 Ford F-150, 2 VW’s, 2 Toyotas, 1 Mazda and 1 Audi.

The loss of jobs by the thousands of autoworkers is a microcosm of the contraction we are all going to see. American society is currently living an unsustainable lifestyle, and the rest of the world wants it too. That’s not going to happen, but the disconnect will be an ugly thing. Every generation of Americans has expected to live a better life than their parents, but it’s unlikely that the current set of kids will see that happen. How will we handle extreme hardship is the question for our time. Nobody is talking about it. The economic collapse caught them by surprise. This is looming, but undiscussed.

With 25% unemployment, and oil at $300 a barrel, many things will have to change. We’ll be more focused on food production than we’ve been in decades. Our current agribusinesses are much too dependent on fossil fuels to keep cranking out cheap processed foods. I can’t say I’ll miss the parking lots torn up for agriculture.

Well Written Look at America Soon

2009-04-29T17:09:00.002-04:00

Somewhat long, but THIS is a really interesting look at a posteconomicapocalyptic vision of the future. Tomorrow will be nothing like yesterday

Getting Rid of the RINOs

2009-04-29T15:43:00.001-04:00

It’s really just too damn easy to shoot down those silly Republican, but as long as writing continues to be therapeutic, I’ll just have to keep it up. The latest rant on talk radio is all about “good riddance” to Arlen Spector (R>D:PA) and any other “RINOs” that want to leave. They have somehow come to believe that the reason they got voted out in droves is that they weren’t conservative enough. I’m not making this up!

After 8 years of GWB and his wasted trillions on Iraq and bankers, they get their panties in a knot about $800+billion that at least goes to America and Americans. You have to love the logical gymnastics that goes like this.

Criticism of Bush is “blame America first”.
Bush ran the government.
Government is bad.
Criticism of government is good.
Repeat as needed.

Sheesh.

As has been pointed out, it is difficult to compare the outcome of a fair and (small d) democratic election with tyranny. Define tyranny: a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator, not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition, etc. Has anyone put forward an argument that somehow the Democrats are ruling outside the constitution? I remember voting last fall, and there was a full-throated opposition.

Again, it’s not the hate, it’s the stupidity. Like trying to tie Al Qaeda with Fascism, which is a real hoot if you look up the definition of Fascism.

Basically the minority party expects the Dems to do what they want, thus making America long for the warm, comforting embrace of George W. Bush and Darth Vader. People can be scared, and they can be lied to. One thing is for certain. Great Depression II is going to be no place to oppose single payer (government paid) health care, a better social safety net and tax cuts for the rich. The “raising taxes” bogeyman is such a load of crap. If my taxes went up $17,000 a year, I would still be saving money on health care.

Try telling the coming generation that you’re in favor of crushing student loan debt, health care denial by insurance companies, bailouts for bankers, no help for home owners and a bankruptcy law that looks a lot like debtors prison and let me know how that works for you.

Republicans and Torture

2009-04-25T16:14:00.004-04:00

So now, the right wing has their panties in a bunch over release of the now infamous “torture memos”. I’ve heard everything from how damaging this is to our security, demotivating for the CIA and a gift to terrorists everywhere. This from the same assclowns who preach that the ends don’t justify the means. Unless we’re scared. And man, they can spread fear like nobody’s business.

So here we have another example that shows the Christian/Right WingTM coalition is all about what the wealthy guys want rather than what their namesake (JC) would have to say about it. JC was severly tortured before being killed. I can infer two things from that; one, he’s not real keen on capital punishment, and two, he’s not a big fan of torture, having been a victim of each.

It’s disturbing that the issue has come down to whether it worked, rather than is it legal, moral, ethical or something we wouldn’t mind having done to our troops. America’s moral sense of goodness has been pretty trashed by the last eight years. Taking torture off the table would be a good start to shining it up a little.

Sean Hannity Defines Assclown

2009-04-23T11:32:00.002-04:00

So I’m driving around Metropolis, Illinois (home of Superman. Really.) and I’m bored so I give the AM dial a spin. Who pops up but Sean “I am SO an assclown” Hannity spewing his usual nonsense, bile and lies, when he comes up with this winning question to ask each of his knuckle dragging guests, “How many Americans will die because of Obama’s actions this week?” Huh? Exactly what actions is he speaking off? The release of the torture memos from the CIA.

Right. We admit in writing to what everyone in the world already knows and that amounts to dooming Americans to death. Gotcha. What‘s it like living in bizarro world? Here’s a document very similar to the “torture memos” from a different era, but one that has echoes of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft:

Confidential!
To: Chief Public Prosecutor in Düsseldorf . Subject: Mistreatment of Political Prisoners
Meeting at the Reich Ministry of Justice on June 4, 1937
It has been recognized by government leaders at the highest levels that more rigorous interrogations are necessary and indispensable. In such cases, it would be nonsensical to prosecute the officers carrying out the interrogation for exceeding their authority. However, public prosecutors must carry out the letter of the law and have no possibility of choosing to prosecute or not as they may judge fit ... At present, we thus have a situation which cannot continue: a deficient sense of what is right on the part of judicial officers; an undignified position for police officers, who try to help matters by foolish denials [that torture has taken place in court proceedings]. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the possibility of relevant limits. There followed a discussion of individual questions:
Question 1: For which offenses are more rigorous interrogations permissible? There was general agreement that, in principle) interrogations of this kind may be undertaken in cases where charges involve the immediate interests of the state. ... chiefly treason and high treason. Representatives of the Gestapo expressed the opinion that a more rigorous interrogation could also be considered in cases of Jehovah's Witnesses, explosives, and sabotage. ... It was unanimously agreed that charges under paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code [that is, charges of homosexuality] should not be considered as grounds. A more rigorous interrogation is, as a general principle, never permissible in the case of foreigners. ...
Question 2: Nature of corporal punishment? As a general principle, in more rigorous interrogations only blows with a club on the buttocks are permissible, up to 25 such blows. The number is to be determined in advance by the Gestapo (see Question 3). Beginning with the tenth blow, a physician must be present. A standard club will be designated, to eliminate all irregularities.
Question 3: Who may order a more rigorous interrogation? As a general principle, only Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. Local state police stations must obtain permission in advance from Berlin. Without permission a more rigorous interrogation may not be conducted. ...
 Question 5: What assurance exists that innocent persons will not be interrogated with the more rigorous measures? This question is answered by the measures named under Question 3. 
 Question 6: How are judicial officers to deal technically with cases:
(a) in which permissible corporal punishment has been inflicted under the terms stated above? If an office of public prosecution receives a complaint, it contacts the state police and confirms that permission was granted (by the Gestapo Berlin). If said permission is shown to have been given, no charges are pressed, and a formal announcement should be made: "Investigation has shown that a criminal act was not committed."
(b) in which corporal punishment has been inflicted that is not permissible under the terms stated above? If it transpires that permission was not obtained, commence investigation immediately and report at once to the Central Office of Public Prosecutions [in Berlin]. ...
The Gestapo will receive a copy of [this memo] from the Ministry [of Justice], whereupon it is to act on them immediately ... and issue instructions to state police stations. The Ministry of Justice will for its part then issue instructions to public prosecutors.

Nice company to be hanging with, guys.

Alcohol and the Church

2009-04-22T14:41:00.002-04:00

Maybe it’s different from when I was coming up, but one of the key features in the lifestyle of Evangelicals was abstaining from alcohol. I remember the little plastic shot glasses of Welch’s grape juice and cubes of Wonder Bread for Communion. Even at that age, I couldn’t figure out why none of the people in the church drank beer, but all the neighbors did.

If drinking was so bad, why did JC actually produce the stuff miraculously? Once again, the disconnect from these people’s practices and the alleged source of them could hardly be farther apart.

American Evangelicals and the Poor

2009-04-21T19:25:00.003-04:00

One of the most repeated concepts in all four gospels is that JC wants his followers to help the poor. Most of his admonitions were about helping the poor. Damn near the only thing He said that all four gospels agree on is, “If you want to be perfect, give all that you have to the poor and follow me.”

Okay, so the real important items that most Evangelical assclowns follow is to have a HUGE megachurch building, fight homosexual rights, protest abortion, fight for lower taxes and get rid of welfare. Why the fuck would an eternal, all-powerful God need a new house? I’m pretty sure a guy like that would be protected from the weather by other means. I go kind of apeshit seeing a HUGE church in an area that has homeless people. Any allegedly Christian church that has a building (used a few hours a week MAX) that doesn’t also run a food kitchen and a homeless shelter is a complete fraud. That would be most of them, of course.

So, anyway, these are the sheep that have been co-opted by a rapacious Right WingTM and basically are doing damned near zero that their deity asked for, just following the will of the Republican task masters. What the hell is wrong with American Christians?

More Fun with Christians

2009-04-20T16:17:00.001-04:00

Okay, there are a lot of things Christian in the US rant and froth about that the Big Guy never mentioned. We’ve covered abortion and gay marriage in that context. But the Republicans did such a great conflation and confusion of Republican virtues and biblical ones that most US Evangelicals oppose paying taxes, even though the Big Man said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” in direct response to question about whether taxes should be paid.

Basically, Christian tax resisters and tax cutters are working in direct opposition to what their own god said in their own holy book. But the Republicans have such a tight grip on them that they disavow their own god’s words in order to reduce taxes on the wealthy, who, incidentally, are also condemned by the same god.

Once again, the younger ones seem to not be as rabid for the most part, but honestly, taking apart this religion is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Opposed to Gay Marriage?

2009-04-19T15:42:00.003-04:00

If you haven’t seen the video making the rounds, it’s a hoot, if unintentionally. Another set of Evangelical activists have put on a scary ad about how much gay marriage is harming the nation and every American. It uses the usual fatuous nonsense about the “biblical” ideal of a family. Biblical? Have the read that book they keep thumping?

Here are a few snippets from the good book:

Lamech said to his wives, "Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words.

so he went to Ishmael and married Mahalath, the sister of Nebaioth and daughter of Ishmael son of Abraham, in addition to the wives he already had.

Give me my wives and children, for whom I have served you, and I will be on my way.

Then Jacob put his children and his wives on camels,

Esau took his wives from the women of Canaan:

the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them. 

And that’s just a quick glance through Genesis, never mind the rest! So we have one verse among ceremonial laws that can be read as opposing homosexuality, there are countless stories of men with multiple wives. David was alleged to have seven hundred!

Now would somebody please with a straight face tell me where Christians get cover for their anti-gay phobia from the Bible? A couple of centuries back, they used it to deny women their rights, not to mention slavery. The entire Southern Baptist Church, the largest protestant denomination was created for the sole purpose of keeping out them darkies!

The good news, as with most good news involving the scary right-wingers, is that they are fewer with every passing election cycle. They are a group based on old, white, southern, angry men. And they’re dying off.

Good riddance.

PS Apparently the same idiots who brought you "teabagging" without googling it first have now given us "2 million for marriage" which they choose to hiply call 2M4M. Ever read a personal ad section and seen M4M?

Priceless.

This I Believe

2009-04-19T10:57:00.000-04:00

I’m listening to This American Life on NPR (of course) and the topic is, “This I used to believe”. This leads me to need to repeat a rant that I’ve given live many, many times.

I’ve offered this up to dozens, possibly hundreds of Christians, and I’ve gotten no answer more satisfying than, “I never thought about it that way.” American Christians seem to have issues that drive them nuts. They loathe the idea of abortion. This is pretty consistently held across most Evangelical groups and exploited by Republicans. Abortion is murder. Period. Always wrong, never acceptable, forbidden by God, Jesus and Mary.

Nobody is pro-abortion. Abortion is required as a correction of a mistake. If no mistakes were ever made, no abortions would be needed. But humans are flawed and always have been. The word “prostitute” occurs hundreds of times in the bible. You have to assume prostitutes frequently became pregnant, and it’s also safe to assume that pregnant prostitutes get very little business. Given no contraception at the time that we know of, they must have practiced abortion, whether by some mix of herbs or falling down a staircase.

And yet, the issue of the evil of abortion, so important to many Christians that it is their single issue in all political choices is never, not once, called out in the bible as a problem. Why is that? Jesus hung with hos and never called them on it. Not once. Never. What is wrong with these people? Shouldn’t your most important political issue be at least mentioned in your holy book?

Right Wing and Hating America

2009-04-18T17:30:00.001-04:00

If you want to get depressed about the level of political discourse in the country these days, just pop on over to the delightful Hannity forums, and read a few. The moderator (the MODERATOR mind you) of the site opens a thread called. “Is it time to shut it down?” The idea is that democrats in general and President Obama in particular have so thoroughly ruined America that we need to shut down all businesses in the US until we can remove all of the duly elected Democrats are replace them with real Americans.

Bad enough for the moderator to open it, but the 750 posts in the next 24 hours contain outright threats on the life of the President, a call to armed insurrection and much talk of violence. As Jon Stewart put it so well, “You’re confusing tyranny with losing.”

These people somehow can’t manage to see that they lost an election, actually quite a few, and when your party loses, you can’t just called for a revolution and claim to believe in democracy. It just doesn’t make sense. One of the unintended funny comments echoed GWB’s preemptive war strategy, “We have to take out Obama for what he might do in the future!” Here’s another actual quote, “Obama is the greatest threat to this nation that it has ever faced.” Really? Not Hitler? Tojo? The Civil War? (These are the type of assclowns who call it, “The War of Northern Aggression”.)

Huh? No wonder these guys lost.

The Republican Party is in real danger of falling off a cliff, and as it’s aging, dwindling membership loses moderates and independents, the remaining folk become more and more toxic, and more and more marginalized which will make them madder and madder. This can’t end particularly well. And their own little media circus of Sean and Rush and Ann and Michelle Glen and all their lesser wannabees are fanning the flames of this desire to harm, hurt or destroy those who’s opinions vary from theirs.

A two party system is probably a healthy thing, so the disappearance of the Republican Party would likely be an ugly thing. Personally, I’d like to see a parliamentary system, which coalitions and a Prime Minister, but that would require a constitutional conference, and THAT would be really, really hard to pull off in the current atmosphere. Imagine not having to pick the lesser if two evils, and actually join a Socialist or Nihilist or Populist or Libertarian or Agrarian or Green or Muslim or Christian party? Works for me.

American History

2009-04-17T17:52:00.003-04:00

Sorry to not write today, but is the funniest damn thing I've seen in forever, especially in light of the recent teabagging absurdity.

(Sorry but blogspot decided to mess with my head and the tags won't work.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLzo9pOXa-s&feature=player_embedded

Really Red State Territory

2009-04-16T18:01:00.001-04:00

We’re here in Barkers Crossing, Georgia, which means I tend to shut my mouth and open my tailgate. From the graphic above, you can see that I appear vaguely partisan to the passing driver and have gotten some dumb shit yelled at me over the years, but at least there are a few advantages to being most of two meters tall and a hundred kilograms. Somehow, they never actually take a swing. Go figure. Anyway, with the tailgate down, it’s a lot quieter and more peaceful which the dear wife appreciates.

I’ve been reading the follow-ups to the whole Tax Day Grass Roots (Really Not Funded By The Usual Republican Billionaires) Tea Bag Day Event, and it strikes me what a bunch of ignorant angry idiots there are in our fine country who can be so easily swayed.

My current favorite is Right WingTM outrage over DHS reporting (ordered by the GWB administration) that extremist groups might target veterans for membership and recruiting to carry out terrorist acts (anyone remember Tim McVeigh?) Without pausing for breath, they go on to call for the violent overthrow of the US Government in a revolution. Do these people have any inner monologue? Hello? Is this thing on?

Honestly, the fact that these idiots got their candidates elected and reelected in the last decade makes me wonder what a great idea democracy really is. Democracy if we win, revolution if we lose. Sounds sane to me. NOT.

Republicans Losing It

2009-04-15T16:50:00.004-04:00

You know, you just can’t make this stuff up. The whole “tea party” thing is pretty funny, but the best part is how they make themselves look increasingly lost to the young. They are promoting these things on Fox News, and Hannity, Limbaugh, et al are talking up teabagging as the great new Republican stand for the common man. Teabagging will be just the trick to reach out and grow the base!

One small problem. Before betting the house on it, you think one of these geniuses would google it. Apparently, anyone under 30 is fully aware that “teabagging” refers to scrotal/facial contact, often while the facial contributor is passed out or asleep and the scrotal contributor has a camera. There’s also a large gay fan club of the practice, which is just icing on the, er, nutbag.

C’mon Republicans! Let’s go teabagging!!

Next, this great piece in the WashPo has determined that Rush Limbaugh is the leading cause of the growth of socialism and socialist thought, especially among America’s youth.

I love it. Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, “socialism” just isn’t the boogey man it once was. It’s more like, “European style socialism!” leads to kids looking it up on line and finding that in “European style socialism” education and health care are damn near free, life expectancies exceed our and they get 6 weeks of vacation to start. Where do I sign up?

Anyone under 40 today knows that communists are either crazy North Koreans, bullied people in Cuba or the people who make all the stuff we buy at Wal-Mart. They are likely much more pissed about some 27 year old on Wall Street making more in a year than their entire extended family will in their lifetime, after a taxpayer funded bailout. Now THAT’S where the populist rage is pointed, and the Republicans are having a hard time keeping a straight face talking to anyone but bankers and the mega wealthy.

WHEN WILL THIS DEPRESSION END?

2009-04-14T18:12:00.003-04:00

(With thanks to Jal S. Desai)
Please tell me good friend,
When will this depression end?
When will the homeless have a roof over their head?
When will the starving have money to buy bread?
When will you stop being part of a mob
Desperately looking for a job?
When will the good times return?
When will people have money to burn?
When will all this misery end?
I'll tell you, good friend.
When compassion fills the human heart,
Then this depression will depart!
Things will change at the hour
The rich think of helping the poor.
When the wealthy think it proper
To share their wealth with the pauper.
Everything will become all righty
When we all live in an egalitarian society!

Day Three on the Road with Harvey

2009-04-14T16:01:00.004-04:00

Well, there were fewer open restaurants in the Keys this winter, a good five within a half mile of my house. Tourist oriented businesses have a low life expectancy, so it’s not a huge surprise. But driving into Kissimmee, Florida today, neighbor to Orlando, holy crap! So many shuttered and “for sale” posted businesses, and not just the Mom and Pop variety. Today we saw a shuttered Shell station, also Waffle House, McDonald’s, KFC, Sears and a load of closed motels and restaurants.

I’d been waiting to see what the economics would look like on Main Street, so the next six weeks travel through small town America should be instructional. I’ll try to post daily.

A Whole New Thang

2009-03-27T20:45:00.000-04:00

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the entire game is shifting, and man, do I mean entire. The idea that unregulated free market capitalism, as we’ve experienced since Reagan, is fraudulent and evil and has had huge financial, ethical, moral and humanitarian consequences and they are completely nontrivial. Much of the US and much of the world bought into the unregulated invisible hand as wiser than mere mortals and vastly superior to the judgments of a democratically elected government.

Just how screwed we are and how long it will last and just how bad it would be are issues that are just coming onto the radar screens of the ink stained wretches, to mix the hell out of a metaphor. When we start getting down to it, it all becomes much clearer, but the unholy alliance of the Religious Right, business and the wealthy was doomed from the start, in spite of a nearly three decade run. Now that the unemployed Evangelical sees whom he was supporting at AIG, the entire structure falls of it’s own weight. The party of the angry old white guy will be a minor distraction and regional footnote to the political story of 21st century America.

To them, I say good riddance and don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

On Turning Fifty

2009-03-26T10:43:00.001-04:00

The years mean so much less as we age. The difference between turning ten and turning twenty was profound. I was basically not the same person with a completely different set of friends and acquaintances and had moved from PA to NJ to CT to VT to CA and back to CT. Turning ten, I was a little tan kid in fourth grade in an LA suburb, mostly concerned with BB guns and minibikes. Turning twenty, I was a sophomore at an ivy covered college in Connecticut, lost in a rapturous, heart bending affair of the heart of some sort and bearing absolutely no resemblance to that LA kid.

Flash forward and I’m turning fifty on the same street where I turned forty, living in the same house and with many of the same guests showing up. Same job (none), same wife (and best friend), a little less hair and memory and both grayer at that.

The odd juxtaposition of how quickly it passes and how little things change is sort of paradoxical in an obvious yet unfathomable way. What a ride. I’m so thankful for all the people in my life who have made it a joy, and I hope I get to see them at sixty. The idea that I’m closer to being eighty than nineteen is profoundly disturbing, but I remember friends who didn’t get to grow old, and this seems the better alternative. Geoff Dimmick, Brick Fisher, John Sidgmore, Dave Boast and a host of others would surely rather age than be lost so young.

Happy Birthday to the whole world. No exceptions.

Truth in Advertising

2009-03-25T16:11:00.000-04:00

see more pwn and owned pictures

Another Week

2009-03-23T10:48:00.003-04:00

Monday stumbles through the dawn like a newborn calf, all legs and elbows and surprised to find itself standing. So here we go on my last week in my forties. Turning twenty one was such a shock that nothing after that really has meant much. But this seems different. Unless Danny Hillis and Ray Kurzweil are right about the Singularity, fifty is not middle aged, it’s damned well past it.

That being as it may, life is all just stuff that happens to you while you’re making other plans. So another week is just another week.

Although. The thing that makes life so much more interesting is loved ones, and a whole bunch of them are coming to visit this week for the foreboding 50th birthday party Sunday. I do love a party, and this one should be fun. We’ve got friends, nephews, nieces, great nephews and great nieces, plus a brother and a whole lot of others showing up to make the weekend a lot more interesting.

Pig roast by a genuine former political prisoner (Cuba), steel drum music by Sir Cedric, open bar and lots of delectable munchies sounds like fun to me.

Anyway, a short post, but it’s time to take the dogs to the beach.

Piling on Obama

2009-03-22T16:04:00.001-04:00

Today’s New York Times features a host of generally left leaning pundits who usually cut the new guy in charge a lot of slack. Today was different. They’re going after him for two things mostly; underestimating how pissed off people are about bailouts and how deep the current financial catastrophe is. Well, sorry for being human, but none of these geniuses saw it coming either.

I’ll stop patting myself on the back for calling this thing half a decade ago, and point out that the conventional wisdom missed the whole damn thing and the media was complicit in telling any and all that real estate is going up forever, and buying and holding stocks is the way to gain wealth.

Whoops. Never mind.

Just how the hell to fix this stuff is beyond complicated. A primary problem is the staggering amounts of debt sloshing around in world markets. Repeat after me; there is more debt than money in the world and this can’t have a happy ending. Get it? Most of a quadrillion dollars in derivative debt just can’t be unwound. There isn’t that much money. Quadrillion, with not an M or a B or a T, but a Q. That’s US$1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

There’s no way humans are going back to using the home as ATM by refinancing, and even the credit card abusers seem to be wising up to that nastiness, so it’s not going to be back to business as usual by summer. This is the collapse of a decades long spree of deregulation, cheap credit and the insane notion that “deficits don’t matter”. (Thank you Dick Cheney for that one. Apparently Democratic deficits do?)

So really, we’re just starting to get a vague idea of just how ugly it gets, and in a fair amount of denial in the mean time. Here in Key Largo, most people are employed in the vacation business, as waiters, bartenders, maids, fishing guides, cooks and the like. With discretionary income collapsing by the day, who’s going to go on vacation to the Fabulous Florida KeysTM” and spend money?

This really gets ugly and I have no clue how the population is going to handle it. Unfortunately blaming Obama for inheriting the shitstorm is likely to become a popular pastime. Like The Onion headline states when Obama was inaugurated, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”.

Mainers in a tight spot

2009-03-21T11:13:00.000-04:00

This morning on NPR there was a piece on a couple from Portland, Maine (God’s country) who moved to LA where he gets work and she gets preggers. Flash forward and the work dries up along with the credit cards they’ve been living on. Final plan is to move back to Maine and move in with her mother who lives in a small house in the woods. Dad has lost almost everything in the stock market, and can offer no help except access to a woodlot they can cut and sell or burn for heat. Grow a garden, can the produce, harvest deer, all of these are life skills for hardy New Englanders, but it points out how hard this will be for less handy folks.

What if there’s no mom to move in with? What if you couldn’t grow weeds to save your life? What if you didn’t know a chain saw from a chain letter or have a dad with a woodlot? What the hell will the truly unfortunate do?

Obviously this is just the beginning of a huge change in the lives of everyone on the planet. I write about the American parts of this, mostly because it’s what I know. Some other places face really terrifying futures, including China with literally hundreds of millions of unemployed migrants. Pakistan, holy crap, scares me just to type the name. The lunatics running North Korea? Mass starvation and nuclear high jinks.

Growing up, I was certain I knew how I would die; in a nuclear firestorm when the US and the USSR acted out mutually assured destruction. Maybe that’s why I don’t fear terrorists at all. The threat is so minor in comparison. Beestings kill more people than terrorists, so would someone please give me back my civil rights and get on with the police work of arresting and convicting these guys? Thank you very much.

Anyway, we live in interesting times, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how it works out. Best of luck to both my readers!

The New Stingy Chic

2009-03-20T14:25:00.002-04:00

Just how we handle the freaking financial Apocalypse will define us for a generation. The actual detailed plan for how to pull this off has yet to be written, but I’m dumb enough to give it a try. How do we handle an America in which one out of four wannabe employees are unemployed? I’ve given it some thought and here’s my take on it, although it requires a lot more selflessness and kindness than a lot of us have been capable of these past few decades.

First off, I expect fewer occupied houses, which is not great for the real estate market, to state the obvious. What will happen is people doubling and tripling up in housing. It costs the same to heat a 4-bedroom house with 6 people living in it as it does with 2. A new occupation I think we’ll see is sort of a domestic caretaker. If 4 friends are living together and one loses his or her job, I can see that person doing the laundry, cleaning and cooking for the other three in return for lodging and food.

It makes sense with everyone worried about employment to know that unemployment doesn’t necessarily mean homelessness. The fate of the abandoned McMansions as future multi-family housing just makes a lot of sense as the absurdity of putting 3 or 4 people in a 10,000 square foot house becomes even more obvious. I think our recent immigrant families especially would adapt to this well, as culturally multigenerational households are familiar. Primarily, I’m thinking Latin Americans, but the same is true for South Asians and Chinese.

How else do we adapt? Is it just me or do there appear to be yard sales everywhere? Many times as many as in years past. And some amazing bargains. (Yes, I stop at yard sales.) I’ve given a lot of thought to the food situation and I’m not sure how it works out. My brother in Guatemala tells me that fast food restaurant have a “10Q” menu, meaning all items on it are 10 Quetzals or less, about US$1.25 or less than a Euro. I could see that happening here with McDonalds selling rice and beans and maybe a sausage for a buck. But the more widespread feeding of the population seems harder to grasp. Most churches and civic organizations (Lions, VFW, Chamber of Commerce, et al) have kitchen facilities, so maybe they’d rotate?

It’s always killed me that there are 350,000 churches in America and roughly 750,000 homeless people. The churches are used a few hours a week for a Guy that allegedly has mansions in heaven (Really! Look it up!) with the homeless hang on the curb, in the dumpster or at a shelter if they are lucky. Can somebody tell me the scriptural basis for NOT cooking for and feeding the homeless and putting them up in churches? Hello? Is this thing on?

Though I don’t agree with his religious views, you’ve got to love a guy like Larry James. You can oppose Christianity as much as I do, but man, you’ve got to give him credit. Maybe there are a lot more potential Larry Jameses out there. It would sure make this whole collapse of what we knew much easier for many, many people.

And then there’s this guy, who gives me a huge amount of hope. What a great story about some great people. There's still a lot of hope.

AIG Redux

2009-03-19T10:58:00.002-04:00

Believe it or not, I used to be important in the world of finance and high tech. I loved showing up for a board meeting at Goldman or one of the upper crusty venture capital companies in shorts, Birkenstocks, tie dye and a pony tail. That bunch was an incredibly entitled group of people. They took their insane paychecks and plush surroundings as a birthright. To hear about the tone deafness of the folks at AIG is just a walk down memory lane.

I’ve got no problem with wealth, or big payouts. It’s just that they ought to reflect actual value created or social good or something more tangible than a credit default swap. My money came from growing a business, hiring thousands and providing internet access for millions. Hard to argue that wasn’t worth a few million bucks. But the money scramblers? No, no, no.

Anyway, I have such memories of these guys, even a few literal billionaires, and how they treated immense paychecks and actual dynastic wealth; like a right owed them. It’s not hard to imagine how the kids at Goldman, Citi, AIG and the other bailouts could be so blind to the outrage, since their peers and neighbors were the same entitled pricks. I don’t think I ever met a Democrat among them, and they sure laughed at the religious right that made their party the dominant player for most of the last few decades.

A new friend recently asked how I would describe the human race in one word. I said, “Flawed.” These people certainly show that. And since many of them were and remain friends, I can understand some of where they come from. The prep schools and Ivy League colleges they attend set them up to feel superior. The investment banks and venture capital firms feed the desire to be crazy wealthy as if it’s the normal course of things.

So now, it’s a little shocking to see them coming out of the bubble and blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight. It will take them a while to get their bearings, and oh, what an adjustment that will be. Michael Lewis in “Liar’s Poker” in the early eighties wrote what he thought would be a call to arms about the silly excesses on Wall Street, like paying an investment bank CEO an absurd $2 million a year. How crazy is that? The public will never stand for it! The amazing thing is that he was off by nearly three decades.

It’s hard to have a lot of pity for the formerly fabulously well to do. Ironically, there was a huge amount of social pressure to spend like you made even more than the insane pile you did, so between real estate values plummeting and the stock market tanking, I believe a lot of these guys will go from private jets to the Hamptons to really not great circumstances. Without 7 figure bonuses, the second house definitely goes, the private jet is gone, primary residence in doubt, later to the Porsche, the trophy wife takes a hike and hello to $50,000 a year as a junior bank manager in Hoboken. Hard to feel sorry, but what a flight path that must be to live through.

The reality of the hard struggle for most Americans to provide food, shelter and health care to their families is evident to most of us. There has been an “elite” (Republicans stole and twisted the term) living high above the fray, pulling down small fortunes while the bulk of the population struggled to hold it together. I’m sure they would be surprised at the depth and intensity of the animosity their fellow citizens have for them, but they really need to get used to the idea and fast.

Class war is an ugly thing (another stolen and twisted phrase) but you just can’t keep this shit up in broad daylight and not get fed to an angry mob.

2009-03-16T13:26:00.002-04:00

Front page New York Times story today cites the huge increase in volunteers showing up to do charitable work while unemployed. That’s a great sign that maybe we’ll pull together as a country and make things better. For now, it seems like we’re steering the right way and not into Mad Max or fascism. I’m watching a piece from NBC as I type that shows evictions by police an hour north of here. In my younger days, we went bankrupt and the bank seized the house. It’s pretty damned devastating, but it’s great to now that rather than riot and rage, people are volunteering to help others.

They’re foreclosing 50,000 houses in Vegas this year and 12,000 in Miami. How many families and individuals does this affect? How would you like be renting a house, be current on your payments and have the police show up and literally throw all your stuff into the street? How would you like to watch your kids see this? It’s just devastating.

Anyway, I remain cautiously optimistic that the social and political outcome in this country will be positive, though extremely painful. The economy will definitely go to hell, but maybe, just maybe, as a people, we will get by.

Buddha and the Cows

2009-03-16T10:11:00.002-04:00

One day in spring, Buddha was sitting in the grass with a group of students. They were interrupted by a frantic man who ran up to them and said, “Have you seen my cows? They escaped! They are my whole life! If you see them, let me know immediately! I live in the house over there. At least I will if I find my cows. Where can they be?”

With that, the man ran off, terrified of losing his cows. The Buddha looked at each of his students and said, “Let us take a moment to be thankful that we don’t have any cows.”

A Glimpse of the Apocalypse

2009-03-14T14:53:00.002-04:00

Today’s New York Times has a front page story that features the concerns of the Chinese premier over the US’s ability to pay the trillion US dollars it owes Beijing. They seek assurances that the money won’t go up in smoke. As a friend of mine much smarter than me once said, “They’ll get their dollars back. Can’t promise what those dollars will be worth.” The point is (obviously to economists) that the best way for a nation (from its’ point of view) to pay off deft is to inflate the currency.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the lenders’ view. Should the Chinese stop loaning us money, the price of our bonds would have to fall so someone would want them. Uncle Sam’s crazy bond blowout! Prices so low, it’s insane!

Brief note here. As the price of a bond falls, the interest rate goes up. The dollar denomination is what you get at the maturity of the bond, either months or years from now. Here’s how it works:

I loan you $90 for your offer to pay me $100 in a year. I earn $10 for my trouble, so I get (10/90=0.11) 11% interest.

Later, I loan you $80 for your offer to pay me $100 in a year. I earn $20 for my trouble, so I get (20/90=0.22) 22% interest.

Much later I loan you $70 for your offer to pay me $100 in a year. I earn $30 for my trouble, so I get (30/90=0.33) 33% interest.

Get it? The cheaper the loan (basically a 1 year $100 bond) the higher the interest. And while the full $100 has to be paid on all three loans, until the end of the year (the maturity), the first guy is screwed if he needs his money sooner, since no one will give him the $90 he loaned, just the $70 the last guy got.

Throw in the higher inflation inevitable with falling bond prices, voila! You see why the Chinese have their knickers in a knot. They can sell (or just stop buying) and the value of their holding will fall in dollar terms immediately, or they can hold on and have the value of the dollar decline, getting back at maturity the right number of dollars, but much less value in what they can buy with these new smaller dollars.

Got it? Good.

Basically, we all know that the US Treasury isn’t like Scrooge McDuck’s basement, with piles of cash and gold lying around. To fight the Iraqi war, bail out the banks and stimulate the economy, we’ll need to borrow the money from guess who?

As noted previously, most Americans never saw this thing coming. Imagine being Chinese! They didn’t have a market economy the last time a nasty spell came around in the early 80’s. Yours truly was moving furniture for $3 an hour with an Economics degree from Trinity College. My friend who cleaned the Slurpee machine at 7/11 wasn’t a Pakistani immigrant. He was a native Californian with a Doctorate in Physical Chemistry.

I’ll be 50 this month, so I remember the hard times and have been cautious about risk, markets and debt. Any American under 50 never saw it first hand. Any Chinese of any age has never been through this. It will become very political, very contentious and very dangerous when 100 million newly middle class Chinese get sent back to the rural villages.

May you live in interesting times.

Slowly catching on…

2009-03-14T11:13:00.002-04:00

For those of us who saw it coming, there’s a sense of scheudenfrade watching others come to terms with the financial Armageddon. There are a lot of older people who followed the rules and had a “diversified” stock portfolio that’s nearly gone. Buy and hold indeed. The alternative “safe” strategy of Treasury bills (bonds) is paying out a mighty 0.75%. So, let’s see, to live on the interest at a modest US$50,000 a year would require a nest egg of precisely $6,666,666.66.

How many retirees are sitting on that kind of wealth? Would you expect to be living on fifty thousand a year after piling up nearly seven million dollars? Most people would be thrilled to retire with a million bucks in the bank, but to keep it safely in T bills means living on US$7,500 a year. That’s like having a job that pays US$3.68 an hour, less than half the legal minimum wage. And that’s with a million bucks!

No wonder there are so many anecdotal tales of older folks going back to work. So sad after a lifetime of work and savings to have it basically stolen by a bunch of fat cat Wall Street type who got filthy rich while losing our money. The Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer face-off Thursday really managed to sum it up well, as well as just being funny. There’s something terribly wrong with the best journalist in America being a comedian, but thank Dog for Jon Stewart.

10 Things about Obama's Plan

2009-03-11T12:53:00.002-04:00

This is worth a repost. More tomorrow.

Last week, President Obama unveiled his budget—his blueprint for America—and it's ambitious, amazing, and unapologetically progressive. I thought you should see this summary of what the plan would do from MoveOn.org. Please check it out and pass it on!

10 things you should know about Obama's plan

The plan:

Makes a $634 billion down payment on fixing health care that will go a long way toward paying for a more efficient, more affordable health care system that covers every single American.1

Reduces taxes for 95% of working Americans. And if your family makes less than $250,000, your taxes won't go up one dime.2

Invests more than $100 billion in clean energy technology, creating millions of green jobs that can never be outsourced.3

Brings our troops home from Iraq on a firm timetable, finally bringing the war to a close—and freeing up almost ten billion dollars a month for domestic priorities.4

Reverses growing income inequality. The plan lets the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire and focuses on strengthening the middle class.5

Closes multi-billion-dollar tax loopholes for big oil companies. 6

Increases grants to help families pay for college—the largest increase ever.7

Halves the deficit by 2013. President Obama inherited a legacy of huge deficits and an economy in shambles, but his plan brings the deficit under control as soon as the economy begins to recover.8

Dramatically increases funding for the SEC and the CFTC—the agencies that police Wall Street.9

Tells it straight. For years, budgets have used accounting tricks to hide the real costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, and too many other programs. Obama's budget gets rid of the smokescreens and lays out what America's priorities are, what they cost, and how we're going to pay for them.10

Pretty amazing, right? Can you pass this on to your personal network too, to make sure everyone knows how far-reaching and progressive Obama's plan is?

Thanks!

P.S. Turns out there are way more than 10 amazing things in Obama's budget and we couldn't resist sharing just a few more.

Stops unnecessary government subsidies to big banks, health insurance companies and big agribusinesses.11,12,13
Expands access to early childhood education and improves schools by investing in programs that make sure every child has a qualified, strong teacher.14
Negotiates for better prescription drug prices using Medicaid's tremendous bargaining power.15
Expands access to family planning for low-income wo men.16
Caps the pollution that causes global warming, and makes polluters pay to support clean energy innovation.17
Sources:
1. "Obama Offers Broad Plan to Revamp Health Care," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-health.html
2. "Obama Expects Fight Over $3.55 Trillion Budget Plan," Bloomberg News, February 28, 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aiLyabbGqJBo&refer=home
3. "Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness," Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/02/energy_sunshine.html
4. "The Economic Cost of War in Iraq and Afghanistan," The New York Times, March 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/weekinreview/01glanz.html
5. "Tax Cuts," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-tax.html
6. "Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness," Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/02/energy_sunshine.html
7. "Student Loans," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-edu.html
8. "Obama unveils budget blueprint," CNN, February 26, 2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/26/budget/
9. "Obama budget would boost SEC, CFTC, FBI," Reuters, February 26, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE51P5RD20090226
10. "Obama's budget," Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-budget27-2009feb27,0,2535327.story
11. "Student Loans," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-edu.html
12. "Health Insurance Stocks Dive on Medicare Advantage Cuts," The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/02/26/health-insurance-stocks-dive-on-medicare-advantage-cuts/
13. "Agriculture," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-agri.html
14. "Investing Wisely in Our Children," Center for American Progress, February 26, 2009
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/02/education_budget.html
15. "Obama Offers Broad Plan to Revamp Health Care," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-health.html
16. "Obama Offers Broad Plan to Revamp Health Care," The New York Times, February 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-health.html
17. "Setting 'Green' Goals," The New York Times, Febru ary 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/washington/27web-energy.html

Good News?

2009-03-10T14:23:00.003-04:00

I’ve been scanning the media for stories about the social reaction to current economic events. It seems like the traditional reactions to extreme economic downturns have been either pulling together in shared sacrifice or Fascism, at least that’s how the last one turned out. To get to Fascism would probably require a fair amount of violence and an increasingly forceful response by government to suppress it.

Today’s USAToday (useful for learning what the proles know) has two front-page stories about the better outcome; outpourings of public philanthropy and families coming together in hard times. While it’s heartening to think that Americans might just pull together in hard times, there are a few countries out there, in similar distress, about whom it’s much more difficult to be sanguine.

Let’s see who might take a less happy direction.

Russia? Check.
China? Check.
Albania? Check.
Turkey? Check.
Pakistan? Holy shit.
India? Holy shit tambien.

Anyway, the bad news is that more than a couple of the scarier candidates have nukes. Great. So how does this play out? The bizarre strengthening of the USD against other currencies is horrible news for many of the most challenged countries out there.

Anyway, the good news is that we Americans might not just kill each other off.

The bad news is how many other folks just might be up to the task.

Rush Limbaugh- My Hero

2009-03-03T10:44:00.001-05:00

Okay, nobody loathes the dittoheads and their master as much as I do, but Oh. My. God. The Republicans are just shitting themselves over this vacuous blowhard who holds sway with the hard-core right wing base. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was forced to apologize, stating, “I respect Rush Limbaugh, he is a national conservative leader, and in no way do I want to diminish his voice."

Can we start a “Draft RushSarah2012.com” committee and get these idiots on the ticket? Nothing could better guarantee Obama’s second term. I’d write them a check in a heartbeat.

On his site, Rush is currently bloviating on how the collapse of the stock market is Obama’s fault; the fall started in September when the market realized Obama was going to win. That’s funny, as I recall, McCain went down in flames after the market did, and people realized what a dog’s breakfast Bush & Company had made of things. There will always be idiots who agree with Limbaugh, but I can’t imagine an America in which a majority would vote for him.

My personal enmity for the guy has a lot to do with my parents, who are huge fans of Limbaugh. How the hell can self-described Evangelical Christians take their moral guidance from a thrice-divorced drug addict? And why should the head of a political party have to apologize to the nitwit?

More Happy News

2009-03-02T10:57:00.001-05:00

Well, surprise, surprise. Regular readers (both of you) of this blog knew that we were at the beginning of a financial shitstorm, rather than looking for a bottom and quick recovery to what was, and will always be an unsustainable orgy of debt and artificial affluence. AIG has somehow managed to lose over $60,000,000,000 in a mere three months. Based on a standard 40-hour workweek, that comes to over a million dollars an hour. Now that’s talent. The State of California is in crisis because of an annual budget deficit less than half of AIG’s quarterly loss. Holy crap!

The continuing destruction of the US and global economy is likely to continue apace for many years. How long we let the cowboys run their losing rodeo is anybody’s guess, but at some point, the fun and games have to stop. We’re eventually either going to nationalize (government takeover) these losers, or let them file for bankruptcy protection. Bankruptcy is labeled “protection” for a reason. Jobs are protected, but shareholders are generally screwed as share prices hit zero. Just whom we’re protecting by keeping them out of bankruptcy is a really good question.

Well, the Dow fell below 7,000 this morning, marking a fall of more than half since the peak in the fall of 2007. Ouch. How does it feel to lose half of your savings when all you did was work hard, save money and invest in a Dow index fund like the vast majority of financial advisors advised? What if you knew (and I do) that it will fall by half again? How exactly does that feel? I’m thinking “not good”.

So if we head over to the Motley Fool (how I loathe these idiots) they still contend “buy and hold” is the way to go. They suggest that patience is the strategy for now. Patience? Is patience a good strategy when you’re drowning? Anyone here ever heard of cutting your losses? Sheesh.

My favorite abuse by the financial talking heads is the assumption that ten or twenty years of history is meaningful in doing financial analysis. Financial cycles run much longer than that. It’s like making a twenty-minute study of the tides. The data will not be useful.

So where does this leave us? Hell if I know. I’ve been telling those I love, or even like, to avoid debt, stay out of real estate (my outlook since 2004), save money and be frugal. Buy used. Credit scores are an absurdity dreamed up by a marketing team. They will be meaningless in the Depression. Cash is king.

Back to School

2009-03-01T16:23:00.001-05:00

We just found out that my nephew Josh was accepted at the Solebury School starting with 9th grade this fall. Growing up in Guatemala, we thought it might be helpful to get him a little Americanized. The admissions people were really taken with Josh, and worked to snag him including offering a nice chunk of financial aid. Maybe it’s because I turn 50 this month, but I found myself thinking back on being 14 and being in high school.

How much anguish could been prevented if on the first day of high school, a wealthy, successful, self-made alumni got up in an assembly and told the school how reviled, hated and abused he’d been in high school. Maybe he could tell the story and show a photo of the super popular football star who got shanked in prison after being gang raped by 12 of his closest friends.

Popularity in high school feels like the most important thing in the universe, whereas in my experience, popularity in high school seems to guarantee a life of underachieving and wondering where the hell the time went. The geeks run the world, but I was in school before Silicon Valley created geek chic.

After all the years, that’s kind of how it worked out at my school. But at the time I could only see what was in front of me, and the beautiful people just seemed so unapproachable and so serene and popular and funny. I got zero respect, had my ass kicked a few times and was made to feel very insignificant. That speaker at the assembly could have saved many, many of us years of angst.

High school is also when most of us get that hideous, stomach turning, hurts so bad it feels good insanity of falling in love. Unrequited, it’s agony and requited it’s all consuming. On weekends in summer, I always pause to think how many people are at that moment falling in love, getting that certain look, the first touch, the first kiss.

High school is also when many of us make friends that we’ll have for life, which is a first step in creating a world where we create our lives. We get issued a family; a life is what we make it. I hope Josh has the wisdom, the smarts and the good luck to end up with positive friends, a good attitude and the chance to grow into a kind, educated and purposeful man.

Good luck, Josh. You’ll need it.

What just happened?

2009-03-01T14:45:00.004-05:00

This was stolen unabashedly from my pal Eric over at iTulip.com.

As Paul Volcker pointed out over the weekend, the global financial system has disintegrated and no one has any idea how to fix it. Lots of good ideas about how to fix the banking system, but as we've explained, even if any of these things are done -- and we are not holding our breath -- it's the endogenous credit system that's the real problem, the one that used to magically allow consumers to lend new money into existence by taking out a car loan or charging dinner on their Visa card, the one that depended on the now defunct securitized debt market.

Most reasonably aware North Americans have, like me, watched this mess develop for over 20 years. Credit was substituted for savings. Two incomes were substituted for one. Other people's savings were substituted for our own.

These past 20 years have been like a long bus ride into the middle of a desert without food or water, with the driver all along telling us that, no, we are not heading into a desert but traveling along a long stretch of beach that leads to an ocean with palm trees and swimming pools, we just can't see the water yet.

All along the way the skeptics look out the window and say, "We're going the wrong way," and, "Shouldn't we turn around or at least stop to pick up drinking water in case you're wrong?"

"Stop being so negative," yells the driver over his shoulder. "You don't understand neo-classical geography."

Meanwhile, the rest of the passengers in the bus sit watching Survivor on portable DVD players or reading about Britney Spears's hairstylist in The National Enquirer.

One day the bus runs out of gas. The driver gets out, looks around and says, "How about that. Here we are in the middle of the desert without food or water. Who could have known?"

He pulls out a cell phone and shortly a helicopter rescues him and his friends, leaving everyone else behind to fend for themselves.

The End

Legalize It And Tax It

2009-03-01T14:20:00.003-05:00

My God, the new kid just keeps getting better and better. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder is signaling an end to raids on medical marijuana clinics, dispensaries and growers. He wants to give states the right to legislate their own drug laws, at least for marijuana. How does the bluenosed right wing oppose “state’s rights”? Only with a humongous dose of hypocrisy, which they seem to have in abundance. Let’s consider the upsides to legal marijuana, in let’s say California alone.

An end to drug violence on the border, at least the marijuana part.

New massive stream of tax revenues, certainly well into the billions.

If it’s not a crime, you’re not a criminal, so crime falls prima facie.

Vast reduction in prison populations, especially if past offenses are pardoned.

More police available to stop actual bad stuff.

Honestly, what’s to hate?

It might have taken a financial crisis to get us over the hump, but maybe we can over this whole prohibition thing. Here’s a simple test of whether or not legalization is a good idea. Would you rather room with a stoner or a drunk? How about as neighbors? Honest to God, there’s nothing I’d like so much as to have every crazy, wife beating drunk take up weed instead. It’s just really hard to get angry or violent with that kind of buzz on.

Go Obama, and stay tuned for the corporate opposition funded by the liquor and tobacco industries.

Long, but interesting take on the future

2009-02-18T20:10:00.002-05:00

Chris Hedges, "The Looming Collapse of the American Empire"
Fisher Auditorium, Gannett Hall, University of Missouri - Columbia, February17, 2009
The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our empire is imploding. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
Take a look at the grim statistics. The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent.
And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit card companies, shady mortgage brokers and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. Banks, which have negative equities, are charging 23 to 30 percent on credit cards to try and recoup the loss made gambling on subprime bonds. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around the recognition of our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. I am all in favor of a stimulus plan, but not a giveaway to zombie banks, to the creditors, without a dime for actual debt reduction. The hope that half a percentage point, $ 50 billion, might be used to write down troubled mortgage debtors was quashed by this current plan. As Michael Hudson, a professor at The University of Missouri, in Kansas City and a former Wall Street economist has correctly pointed out, what we have done is give $ 12 trillion to the richest one percent – or ten percent of the population – and indebted the economy and the government to this oligarchic class for the next 100 years. We need to refinance mortgages directly so that aid goes to homeowners. The banks and bondholders who made massive profits on these con schemes should take the hit, not the elderly couple down the street. This is what Roosevelt did in the 1930s with the Home Owners Loan Corporation. The stimulus plan is far too small to staunch the bleeding. State and Local governments will face revenue declines of $ 400 to $ 500 billion over the next two years -- yet the money for the states in the stimulus package is about $ 140 billion. Why have we handed $ 135 billion to AIG, which has been raided in Britain by police because of allegations of financial fraud? We are paying out taxpayer dollars to mafia capitalists rather than the victims. It is insane. It is regressive politics. It is the opposite of New deal economics. And it will not work. The taxpayer dollars spent on high speed rail, on clean energy, on infrastructure repair, on food stamps, unemployment compensation and public health are helpful, but pitifully small given the magnitude of what we face.
How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark reality? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state and that dismantles our imperial wars and projects, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.
We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out last Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn’t know this from the Obama administration, which seems hell bent on draining the blood out of the body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with is a corpse—a corpse and no blood. And then what? We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.
“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” Blair told the Senate. “The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”
The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph titled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.” The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”
“An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on.
“Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, the Department of Defense would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document read.
In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.
Adm. Blair warned the Senate that “roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown.” He noted that the “bulk of anti-state demonstrations” internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is “likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year.” He added that “much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism.”
“When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we’re looking for that,” he said. He referred to “statistical modeling” showing that “economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period.”
Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions, youth movements and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.
The committee’s Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond, not quite knowing what to make of Blair’s testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the “conditions in the country” and the global economic crisis “the primary focus of the intelligence community.”
The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, profligate consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world’s resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. We can build as many fishing boats as we want. It does us no good if there are no fish. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt, vapid and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our distorted system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, he writes, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media – in fact about a half dozen of them -- controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
The corporate state, our shadow government, is simply too powerful to be challenged. This is illustrated by our refusal to confront a bloated and wasteful military budget and the bailout. Our managed democracy is being decimated by the forces of empire. The vast sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex are never questioned by either party. The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China’s at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
“In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of foreign war and occupation,” according to Wolin, “democracy will alter its character, not only by assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness, indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate the public rather than engage its members in deliberation. It will demand greater powers and broader discretion in their use (‘state secrets’), a tighter control over society’s resources, more summary methods of justice, and less patience for legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic reforms.”
Imperialism and democracy are literally incompatible, and the ever greater resources devoted to imperialism mean that democracy will inevitably wither and die. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and Princeton, writes, “Imperial politics represents the conquest of domestic politics and the latter’s conversion into a crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could ‘participate’ substantively in imperial politics; hence it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo in electoral debates. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.”
Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights, yet remains firmly rooted in power. That it is still in power, and will remain in power, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in “the experts.” They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around Barack Obama. It is only when these elites – people like Lawrence Summers -- are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.
The principle failure of our elites is their inability to recognize an actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good.
“It is as if the Industrial Revolution had caused a severe mental trauma, one that still reaches out and extinguishes the memory of certain people,” the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote. “For them, modern history begins from a big explosion—the Industrial Revolution. This is a standard ideological approach: a star crosses the sky, a meteor explodes, and history begins anew.”
Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools—do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good. They are stunted, timid and uncreative bureaucrats who are trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions which will satisfy the corporate structure. They are about numbers, profits and personal advancement. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are able to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they think, is a secondary product of the free market. And they slavishly serve the market.
Andrew Lahde, the Santa Monica, Calif., hedge fund manager who made an 870 percent gain last year by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse, has abruptly shut down his fund, citing the risk of trading with faltering banks. In his farewell letter to his investors he excoriated the elites who run our investment houses, banks and government.
“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he said of our oligarchic class. “These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”
“On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal,” he went on. “First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have [reined] in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government.”
Democracy is not an outgrowth of free markets. Democracy and capitalism are often antagonistic entities. Democracy, like individualism, is not based on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens. This is not happening. The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they only know how to manage and sustain established systems, not change them. Financial systems, however, are not pure scientific and numerical abstractions that exist independently from human beings.
Saul has pointed out that the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the Fascist experience, were “to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies” and to “obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest—that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.”
Sound familiar?
We may elect representatives to Congress to end the war in Iraq, but the war goes on. We may plead with these representatives to halt Bush’s illegal wiretapping but the telecommunications lobbyists make sure it remains in place. We may beg our elected officials – and remember constituent calls were 100 to 1 against the bailout -- not to pass the bailout but trillions of taxpayer dollars, in the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history, are given without oversight to Wall Street anyway. We may want single-payer, not-for-profit health care but it is not even discussed as a possibility in presidential debates because the for-profit health care corporations do not want it raised as an option. We, as individuals in this system, are irrelevant.
The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury meanwhile is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests. The government—the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights—is becoming weaker, more anemic and less able to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s.
Our failure is a failure of nerve. We have been neutralized and rendered ineffectual as a political force because of our refusal to hold fast on core issues, from universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans, to the steadfast protection of workers’ rights, to an immediate withdrawal from the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to a fight against a militarized economy that is hollowing the country out from the inside.
Let the politicians compromise. This is their job. It is not ours. If we want to regain influence in the nation’s political life, we must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.
Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are created by the building of movements. This is a lesson we have have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion our ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in America can tell you, has betrayed us.
We are not supposed to be a player. We are supposed to be outside the system. The attempt by the left to take control of the Democratic Party failed with Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. The left, at that point, should have gone back to organizing, street protests, building labor unions, and the mobilization of grassroots activists. Instead, it went for respectability.
The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda. Sure, every four years Democratic candidates pay lip service to the old values of the party, but then they head off to Washington and do things such as ram NAFTA down our throats, throw 10 million people off welfare, and peddle health-care proposals acceptable to the HMOs, huge pharmaceutical giants, and for-profit health-care providers who are, after all, the very sources of our health-care crisis or transfer taxpayer wealth upwards to Wall Street.
The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from President Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not, despite what the well-heeled Democratic and Republican apologists for the free market tell you, commodities. They are not goods. They grieve, and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.
It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate state. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan and maintained by every president since, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.
We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.
Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.
Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.
The Patriot Act, the FISA Reform Act, the suspension of habeas corpus, the open use of torture in our offshore penal colonies, the stationing of a combat brigade on American soil, the seas of surveillance cameras, the brutal assaults against activists in Denver and St. Paul are converging to determine our future. Those dark forces arrayed against American democracy are waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will allow them in the name of national security and moral renewal to shred the Constitution. They have the tools. They will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy. And while they do it they will be waving the American flag, singing patriotic slogans and clutching the Christian cross. Fuld, I expect, will be one of many corporatists happy to contribute to the cause.
We need a more robust understanding of the role of values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. We did not do enough as the working class was finished off with NAFTA during the Clinton administration to resist. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of our spiritual resources that has crippled us. We forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back.
Our failure is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until we had neither. The condemnations we utter — about the abuse of working men and women, the rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry, our disastrous foreign wars, our destruction of the eco-system and the collapse of basic services from education to welfare — are not backed by action. We have been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. We have become hypocrites.
Having a soul means there is coherence between our actions and our values. We can no longer claim this coherence. We have no moral compass. We do not know right from wrong. We have, in our confusion, lost the capacity to make moral judgments. We live in an age when, as Yeats said, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If we do not regain a militancy on the part of the dispossessed, including find the determination to walk away from the two-party system, we will cede the ground the dark forces that seek to dismantle our open society. If we do not reject the assumptions of a consumer society, if we do not learn to live with a new simplicity and humility, we will commit collective suicide. The hour is late. Time is running out.
Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to confront the corporate state that is destroying our nation, to actively defy entrenched power, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.

Hitting Home

2009-02-18T13:40:00.002-05:00

Forecasting this coming Economic Armageddon has sort of deadened me to the personal pain being meted out to so many Americans who thought they were playing by the rules and doing the right thing, only to find themselves unemployed in a house worth less than the mortgage, and a retirement plan cut in half. In a conversation this morning with a great guy I’ve known for years, he has come to the conclusion that he’ll work all his life. He did what he was told, bought some real estate, bought some mutual funds, paid his taxes and thought he was doing okay. He’s resigned to working forever, but worried that his 34-year-old son in a safe job at AT&T is facing layoffs.

The good news is that he’s optimistic that people will pull together and get over being so materialistic. God, I hope he’s right.

It’s becoming more mainstream to hear forecasts of a slide for years in earnings, incomes, stock prices, real estate values and all the other corrective actions that the free market fans hope will be forgotten quickly, but they knew deep inside were inevitable.

Too depressing to write much. Head over to iTulip.com for a real cheery (but nearly always correct) view of the future.

Eight is Enough

2009-02-13T11:36:00.003-05:00

Is it just me or have House Republicans failed to come up with any ideas other than “cut taxes” for the last few decades? Can we concur that much of the massive debt we hand to future generations was caused by tax cuts? Eight years of tax cuts and 30 years of deregulation get us to Great Depression II and these idiots call for more of the same? How do you keep a straight face?

Holy crap, it’s hard to imagine how they can hold their unholy (sic) amalgam of the wealthy, the snake handlers and the racists who make up their core. It’s impressive to get uneducated and unskilled labor to vote down taxes for estates over $6 million. It’s also impressive to be the party of Jesus run by a lot of rich guys. (BTW, Jesus is the guy who said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom off heaven.” What, is that open to interpretation?) It’s impressive to win a second term campaigning on values, and then working full time to privatize Social Security. How would those private accounts be doing in this market? What? I can’t hear you.

There’s really no stopping the fall of just about everything without addressing the unreal loads of debt carried by individuals, corporations and governments. How to pull that off in a globalized economy should be interesting. Already, barriers to trade are being erected by governments increasingly scared of their own citizens.

Recently, USA Today ran a front-page story on the financial collapse and stated it could be as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930’s. I read a copy of USA Today once a month or so to see what the lumpenproletariat is being told. Readers of the WSJ or NYT have known it for months. Readers of iTulip.com have known it for years.

As ever, I’m fascinated by the social implications, and am watching for new developments; foreclosed McMansions turned multifamily, tent cities, kibbutz like farming by the unemployed, household husbandry (goats and chickens in suburbia), community gardening, increased hunting/poaching, new multigenerational households and the like. They must be out there or beginning, but it’s hard to find hard data.

May both my readers ride out the nasty decade ahead with dignity and kindness. Good luck. You’ll need it.

Small World and Rambling Thoughts

2009-02-06T16:01:00.002-05:00

So I’m trying to work on the book, but lacking inspiration, I head for my favorite Key Largo Tiki bar, the always a good time Snappers. I fire up the Mac and I’m staring at the screen and somehow mange to start a conversation with 2 other guys at the bar who look vaguely familiar. The one guy says, “Do you have a brother?” and I mishear the question and say no. Then I hear him say, “I could have sworn that was Bruce Osborn’s brother.”

I say. “Did you say Osborn? That’s me.”

Turns out he works for my oldest brother, and has the job Bruce had 10 years ago, selling breast implants across South Florida. Obviously, the economy is killing his business. Hard to pay for new boobs when nobody’s working and insurance won’t cover it.

Anyway, things are fine in Key Largo, if a little cold for these parts. Hearing people bitch at the outdoor tiki bar here, cuz they need to wear a fleece or sweater to drink the afternoon away on a weekday is actually kind of funny. You get in a rut sometimes, but in a good way.

Sunday we’re headed for Key West for a four-day break from the hell we call Key Largo. The in-laws are in town and taking care of the dogs, so we have even fewer responsibilities than usual, which is to say damn near none. Looking forward to eating well, drinking too well, and lovely bike riding though the 95% of town the tourists don’t know about nor frequent. Just hoping the cruise ships aren’t 4 deep. Some of the most ridiculous assclowns roll off the cheap ones and make life hell. I’d ban them if I could. Maybe a nice global recession will force them to stay in one place and rent out staterooms as apartments. Oceanfront living at a discount price. Hope you only cook with a microwave. Interesting thought that there may we may see growth in apartment availability by turning cruise ships to apartments and McMansions into multifamily housing.

Last night we attended a party for friends who’ve been married 35 years. Though they married very young, it’s still pretty impressive. I talked to a friend who retired early after running a commercial fishing operation. When you’re making payroll, and doing actual labor and producing actual products, you gain a sense of awareness of the economy. He was the first guy I’ve talked to in a long time who “got” the idea of just how bad the economy is and how long and hard the slump will be. Usually, I feel like I’m walking around debt people who don’t even know they’re debt (sic). It’s sobering to see it coming and feel like so many people are just only going to start to get it one of these months. I wish people could grasp this thing, but ignorance is such a huge part of this thing called America.

I need to get o New Orleans sometime before Mardi Gras for a board meeting, but I can’t remember when Mardi Gras is. Always an interesting time to be had, but I wish I could get Harvey up there in a day and save the expense of a hotel. Gotta do the trip anyway, and keep getting them folks backs in their homes in the lower ninth ward. To help out or just check in, see lowernine.org.

That’s the end of this ramble for now.

Reprieve

2009-02-05T11:17:00.003-05:00

I just put off a nasty medical procedure for a month so Liz and I can pop out for a little pre-holiday getaway before next week’s trip to Key West. It’s not an easy life, but damn it, somebody’s got to do it.

Anyway, I started feeling guilty about not writing, as it seems to really improve my wellbeing and that of those around me. That said, here goes.

It’s hard to rant about politics with the new guy at the helm, but what a cosmic shitstorm the kid has inherited. It’s got to feel like Bush handed him the controls to a plane on fire and parachuted out. And the engines are dead. And it’s headed for Manhattan. And the flight attendants are throwing food at him. And the radio is out. Poor bastard.

The economy isn’t as fun to forecast now that a few mainstream types have caught on. The vast majority seem to be oblivious and seriously underestimate the length and depths that this thing will go to. Strikes and riots have broken out in Greece, Latvia, Iceland, France, Britain and Russia.

It seems inevitable that it happens here, but as friend and colleague Eric Janszen notes at iTulip.com, “Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion -- From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they're now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them.

In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the "slave mentality" is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, "in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion."
Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias ... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel.”

That’s a hell of a thing for a country born of revolution, ruled by the wealthy and terrified that the proles will bone up on their history and throw another one. The irony of the right wing’s claims of “class warfare” when discussing taxes the rich will seem all too evident when men in suits driving new Mercedes AMG are dragged from their cars and beaten in the streets by armies of the unemployed, disenfranchised and hungry.

Bob Marley said it so well, “A hungry mob is an angry mob.”

The conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, but it looks like coincidence that the local police departments have been militarized in the name of “Homeland Security” (Is it just me or does that phrase somehow smell Nazi?) It’s harder than going up against club swinging Chicago cops like in Lincoln Park in 1968. This time, they’ve got night visions, automatic weapons and body armor. It’s going to have to get really ugly before it gets really ugly.

(Notice in the picture that the local sherriff's new vehicle has armored gun ports. Who would they be firing at?)

From FaceBook

2009-02-02T09:39:00.002-05:00

FaceBook is the most colossal time sink ever. Recently, friends started posting "25 Random Things About Me" so I thought I'd add my post here.

1. I was conceived in Oak Harbor, Washington, born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and moved to Oxnard, California at age 3 weeks. This was a good indicator of how my life would unfold.

2. I read a minimum of 3 newspapers a day, the New York Times, the regional paper (usually the Miami Herald or Boston Globe) and a really local paper (usually the Portland Herald or Key West Citizen.

3. I eat lunch at a restaurant pretty much every day.

4. I make dinner from scratch almost every night.

5. I go to the grocery store every day.

6. I’ve been married almost 24 years.

7. I’m a certified scuba diver.

8. I’m a very left wing liberal, but I have Republican friends. It kills me that we can’t somehow all come to consensus on the big issues, but people just think differently.

9. I think kindness is more important than love. There are crimes of passion, but none of kindness.

10. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, but I got over it. I’m more of a Buddhist/Unitarian/Atheist now, but I really like to get into a theological argument with Evangelical Christians. Usually, their hypocrisy and misunderstanding of scripture is breathtaking.

11. I used to do long distance offshore racing in catamaran sailboats, which is really a lot of fun, but the boats are all sold off now.

12. I became absurdly wealthy at age 36, which is profoundly humbling.

13. I lost the vast majority of it at age 40, which is also profoundly humbling.

14. I’ve been on the front page of the Washington Post and USA Today, been featured on the TV show 48 Hours, had a half page opinion piece in the Washington Post published, turned down an offer to do the O’Reilly Factor, lectured at MIT and a lot of other crap, but I still fear my third grade teacher, Mrs. Spaid, is going to walk into the room at any minute, and drag me away by the ear saying, “Why are you bothering these grown-ups?”

15. I relive the worst decisions and mistakes of my life before getting out of bed most mornings.

16. I’m clinically neurotic.

17. I feel paternal toward my nephews and nieces and their spouses, and grandfatherly to their kids.

18. I’m extremely insecure, but I mask it by being loud and outgoing.

19. I fear that I am not a good person and have somehow messed up other peoples’ lives through neglect, incompetence and/or errors in judgment. This actually terrifies me and I find that I attempt to make up for it by writing checks to good causes, over tipping and being kind to random strangers. I wish everyone would, but when I do it, it seems completely inadequate.

20. I went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and learned how to be kind at a co-ed fraternity (we called it a siblinghood) called DKE. I have never before or since felt so supported and loved by so many people in one place at one time, and made it my mission to recreate it at some point in my life. The Sales and Service Departments at UUNET Technologies that I ran in the early and mid 90’s came damn close. Really. I’m proud to be able to say that I got rich off of Socialism.

21. I studied economics in college and am very concerned that many of my fellow citizens don’t realize what an economic shitstorm we are headed into. There will be huge social ramifications as former middle class citizens face real poverty and actual hunger. This will not go through without a tad of social unrest.

22. I love my adopted hometowns of Key Largo, Florida and East Boothbay, Maine, and am honored to be treated as a local in both. Each town is made up of tough individual spirits and a sense of community that always makes me proud. We take care of our own.

23. I hope that the hideous economic collapse that is roaring toward us makes us kinder, more community oriented and kind to neighbors and strangers than we have been. There will be a lot of shared pain, and I so hope we rise to the occasion.

24. My memories are so wonderful that I could die tomorrow and feel like it had been a great ride.

25. I want to take the RV next winter and go back to Mexico, and try to figure out my place in the world.

End of the Bush years

2009-01-28T21:28:00.001-05:00

Remember this?

Moving On

2009-01-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Eyes welling up, we watched the inauguration with friends and champagne, so happy the page has been turned on all that was the Bush administration. I imagined Cheney’s wheelchair had restraints, and he was screeching through clenched teeth, “We can still declare martial law, damn it!”

The brutality, the stupidity and the utter bull-headedness of the last eight years has really been a nightmare, and we’ll be paying the price for a very, very long time. Obama has inherited a flaming pile of feces that will be a decade or more in putting out and making right. We’ll see what this country is made of and how it pulls it off.

When starting this rant, I was going to go off on how the right wing attack machine is painting the new guy as a “godless socialist”, but when I googled that and his name, the majority of hits were defending him from that charge. Well done, America! Perhaps I misunderestimated my fellow citizens.

I fear that the electorate expects an immediate and huge change in employment and circumstances, but I’m happy to hear President Obama (how I love to type that) downplay any fast fix. The road to recovery is going to be tough, but hopefully it will be the “all pull together” hard times, like WWII instead of like Mad Max. The first scenario could do wonders for all of us, and the second has only one good point; it would be fun to write about.

Not really inspired today, but I had to get something out.

On Bush’s last press conference

2009-01-12T10:13:00.000-05:00

Oh my God, I can’t stand this idiot. How a majority of voters picked this guy twice is beyond me, and is probably the biggest argument against democracy that I can think of. He’s going on now about why Katrina aftermath wasn’t his fault, because Air Force One in Baton Rouge would distract from rescue operations. Huh? We didn’t need HIM there; we needed qualified professionals there. It’s a shame that he’ll probably never hear from someone like me who could fill him in on how horribly he has robbed my country’s reputation on the international stage.

My God, now he has the audacity to say that people don’t dislike America abroad, just a few old European countries. “I don’t worry about popularity.” Jesus, if he says “homeland” one more time, I’m gonna Ralph. It smells faintly Nazi.

This guy has handed us the nastiest economic, military and employment mess we’ve ever been in, and the assclowns is defending his policies as being best for the country and not about politics. Holy crapoli, I will so not miss this guy.

The Shit Is Hitting The Fan

2009-01-11T12:56:00.003-05:00

We’re finally starting to see awareness in the MSM that the current downturn might not be over by Easter. It’s still the minority opinion, but for the longest time it was damn near impossible to find the lone voice crying in the wilderness. I feel so bad for the people desperately holding onto their US stock portfolios, now cut in half from October 2007 levels.

While the news is full of stories about factory closings and layoffs, I think it’s another one of those cases in which it isn’t real until it happens to you. Then, of course, it’s surreal. There is nothing as desperate and lonely as slowly losing everything you have, the relentless calls from creditors, repossession of property, foreclosure notices and the inability to fix it, to make it better, to escape the hell that is insolvency. We went through it in the early nineties and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

In December 2008, every working day 3,100 homes went into foreclosure. That’s one every six seconds of the workday. Six hundred every hour. Oh, the humanity.

In December 2008, every working day 4,950 individuals filed for bankruptcy protection. That’s one every ten seconds of the workday. Over six every hour. Oh, the humanity.

In December 2008, every working day 26,190 jobs were lost. That’s almost one every second of the workday. Over three thousand an hour. Every hour. Oh, the humanity.

These numbers are just that, numbers. But every one of them represents lives torn apart, marriages shattered, childhoods scarred and a great deal of grief, anger and helplessness that never really go away.

I so hope that we as a people open up our hearts and homes and help those of us who get thrown under the bus by capitalism and hard times, and live through this decade of tough times as a better, more compassionate and thoughtful people. Dog willing.

Richardson withdraws

2009-01-04T17:36:00.003-05:00

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has removed his name from consideration to be Secretary of Commerce amidst allegations that a campaign donor was awarded a $1.5 million contract by the state. WHAT!!! That somehow seems quaint given Halliburton, et al. The Republicans don’t want to investigate whether millions in contributions, almost entirely to Republicans, resulted in billions in contracts, but Bill steps down over a million and a half.

I’m a big Bill Richardson fan, and I expect him to be cleared of any taint, but even if he’s pulling a Blogojevich the scale of the differences are stunning. Arguably, Bush is spending $3,000,000,000,000 on a mistaken war of choice and Bill is accused of misusing $1,500,000. Bill’s number, BTW, in trillions is $0.000,000,002. That’s a two millionth of the amount Bush & crew blew through in Iraq, and investigating Iraq would be petty and partisan.

Sheesh.

Politics are like driving

2008-12-24T17:04:00.000-05:00

see Sarah Palin pictures

Death of the Recorded Music Industry (not a minute too soon)

2008-12-24T16:46:00.001-05:00

The RIAA stopped suing people for sharing music, they announced last week. My own belief is that selling recorded music to profit some large corporation, because only they can get musicians heard has died the death of a thousand cuts. It’s the mimeograph trying to hold off the World Wide Web. Not going to happen.

The Grateful Dead have long had a great business mode; they encouraged fans to record show and share them. I remember hearing Jerry say, “We’re done with the music. You can have it.” Want to make a living at it? Tour. And sell online for those who appreciate liner notes, or as MP3s but for God’s sake, why make Sony or Columbia or the rest of the riaats, I mean rats, get all the cheese?

The history of the treatment of musicians by these people is legendary. Most musicians signing to a major label lost the rights to their own works, and often most of the profits. There is a plethora of songs and stories by artists complaining about their labels, most famously John Fogerty with Vanz Kant Danz (but he’ll steal your money, watch him or he’ll rob you blind). So what’s the new model? Here’s an idea.

My current favorite singer songwriter is Ingrid Michaelson, who embodies getting music heard and spread using new technologies and techniques like Barack Obama did. Maybe I’m out of touch, but it looks to me like an entirely new paradigm. She started out on MySpace and built a community of fans and ended up touring. I’m thinking about how a local talent with some music out there could use this to expand the base and get heard.

Ingrid’s latest effort, “Be OK” has an extremely spare orchestration, entirely acoustic and minimal. Her previous works had big scores and lots of instruments and were great fun, but this one is so much more intimate. And I suspect, less expensive to record and mix. With a little work, why couldn’t an artist record his or her own tunes and mix them with GarageBand or equivalent? Other than a decent mike (we’re talking performers here; you got the mike, okay?) it seems it couldn’t be that hard to actually home produce a dozen cuts for a CD.

Here’s the trick. When it becomes viable for an artist to record an album at home at very little expense (except time), does that mean we could have an entirely democratic world of music? Has it already happened, and I’m just clueless?

As both of my readers know, I’m very concerned with social justice, which will be even more important as we slide into the decade long Great Depression 2. Here’s a chance for artists to kill two birds and get stoned. Ingrid’s latest CD used a couple of engaging, cheap and effective methods available to anyone. First, the profits from the single, “Be OK”, are being donated to the fight against breast cancer. I think food banks would be a very appropriate recipient these days.

The beauty is that once you’re being charitable, much less chutzpah is required. For the very inexpensively created album, a singer who wants to reach a wider audience could put the songs on the net and either turn over all the profits to a charitable organization or from the one song. Radiohead released an album online last year where the customer got to choose the price. Especially when it’s for a good cause, I think people would pay a fair price.

The other nice thing about an album doing good is that you can tap into the national and international networks these outlets tend to belong to. As a longtime fundraiser and donor I call tell, these people are connected.

Being for a good cause also makes it easier to get local press, TV coverage or at least a spot on local NPR. Volunteering with the group couldn’t hurt. You’d know who does what for who, and how to get the national arm to highlight you. This just might be the new paradigm. Every third or fourth album for a good cause, and tour if you need to make money.

This might be a dumb idea, but usually when people say my idea is dumb, I’m about to make a lot of money.

Merry Christmas!

Gay Marriage and the Christians

2008-12-21T16:32:00.000-05:00

I’m borrowing somewhat from a post on The Huffington Post, but the hypocrisy of cherry picking the Bible is a real pet peeve of mine and I never get a straight answer, in spite of asking friends, family and strangers who are Christians. The whole idea of defending marriage from gays and lesbians seems especially silly when the Bible more forcefully rejects divorced heterosexuals. Rush Limbaugh has been divorced three times from women. My friend David has been with Bill for 15 years and together they are raising two nice kids.

Which one is harming the family and marriage?

There are way too many divorced Christians for anyone of stature in the church to stand up and point this out. Because there are so many inconsistencies in the “pick and choose what’s a sin” meme, I’m going to stick to this one till I get an answer. Why don’t we execute heterosexual adulterers? The Bible demands it.

What am I missing?

1. Every word of the Bible is true (as Mike Huckabee stated).

2. We are ordered in the Bible by God to kill adulterers.

3. Anybody feel up to explaining to me why Christians don’t propose the death penalty for adultery?

And by the way, any answer involving “it’s a mystery” needs to turn on itself and ask whether marriage isn’t a mystery as well. Right out of the box, anytime a lot of things remain “mysteries”, you might want to think long and hard about attacking others. How about these apparent truths:

Judge not that you be not judged.
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

That’s just off the top of my head, but doesn’t a theme seem be there?

Here’s the result of a search for “homosexuality” in the NIV Bible:

9Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders 10nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

Okay, that’s it. That verse is the only hit. Period. In the entire Bible. Same search on “poor” gets 178 hits. Divorce? 33. Unless we ban drunks, adulterers, greedheads, slanderers and swindlers from marrying, we are hypocrites. And Jesus didn’t even say it. It was Paul. Who curiously didn’t think much of any kind of marriage.

Whatever. I’d love to have a talk with an actual Christian who can explain who gets to decide what is real law and what is just some funny history. Otherwise, the entire religion remains an absurd joke.

Social interaction placebo

2008-12-21T10:19:00.003-05:00

For the last twelve years, I’ve avoided punching a time clock, or actually any other form of organized employment other than the occasional board meeting. I’m a social animal, and really need interaction with other people. My wife is a fine and lovely companion, but we have little to argue about, and I already know most of her opinions. Social interaction is about the only thing I miss about work. During the whole Monica thing, I was dying for a water cooler to hang near and hear what people were saying, but it wasn’t happening.

Then there’s FaceBook. I’ve sort of casually drifted into it, but I realized it’s a replacement for the water cooler. Email is sort of direct and almost intrusive compared to just dropping a line on what’s up. So it’s like work, without the work, and only with people you like. Interesting.

Fifteen years ago, I was flying around the world, trying to convince people that this internet thing was worthwhile, and would change our live in huge ways; the democratization of the media, an end to TV induced “post literacy”, new social venues for oddballs and specialized interests and a whole world of advantages.

The irony is that all of it has come to be and yet I’m still just stumbling onto this stuff I was forecasting so long ago. My nephews and nieces get huge chuckles watching Uncle Jeff stumble through getting the iPhone or Mac to do what I want, never mind the Tivo or satellite, considering I was there at the birth of all this stuff.

Anyway, I’m not sure how it makes money, but FaceBook is yet another amazing example of how cool interconnectivity is. I wish I could get in touch with the thousands of dismissive skeptics who told me I was nuts and that this internet thing would never catch on. In 1993, I tried to help raise venture capital money for what is now the largest ISP in the world (currently part of Verizon) at a valuation of eight million dollars and got no takers. Eight million. Funny how thing turn out.

Manufacturing Meltdown

2008-12-18T11:03:00.003-05:00

So Chrysler is shutting down all of its’ plants for a month. Toyota halted construction work on a plant in Mississippi that was to make Priuses. This stuff is all interconnected, and the bad times are here when debt levels, corporate, government and personal, are at all time highs. You can’t live off of negative savings. It just doesn’t work. Honestly. Do the math.

So now we’ve got a few hundred thousand more unemployed, at least for now, because Congressional Republicans and the White House had no problem with three quarters of a trillion dollars for banks, but balked at a fifteen billion dollar loan to save jobs. Um, I don’t get it. Two percent of what the banks got (with no obvious benefit I can see to anyone) to save, or at least extend millions of jobs is a problem.

Except for a very few cases, like the workers sitting in at the factory in Chicago, there doesn’t seem to be much organized action by normal citizens yet. Yet.

We leave for Florida next Saturday, and it’s always interesting to read the local press as we pass through small town America. The last two years, the big change we noticed was the unbelievable number of check cashing/payday loan outlets. In one small town in Virginia, Great Bridge, I counted 22 of them just on the main drag.

The real estate sections of small town newspapers are interesting insights into the realities of the local markets. Unfortunately, while the newspapers are dying a death of a thousand cuts, they do a less than stellar job covering their two biggest sources of revenue, the auto industry and real estate. Try googling “time to buy is now” and see how many sad messages like this are out there. It’s sad, but nobody gets paid to bear bad news.

Made Off

2008-12-17T16:01:00.002-05:00

I was feeling all superior over the Bernie Madoff scandal, and would mention to any available ear what sheep people were to invest in something so obviously flawed. Today, I got an email from my money guys showing that I was out $42,000 to the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Doh! Perhaps a little modesty next time, you think?

Unsubscribe

2008-12-17T15:43:00.002-05:00

I’ve had an AOL account for nearly 20 years, and over time I’ve ended up on a seemingly endless series of subscription and spam list. Back in my day, you never responded to these things, because it simply proved it was a valid account and the volume of spam increased. Recently I realized fully 90% of my inbox contained crap I didn’t want. I mentioned it to Liz, and she said she’d been unsubscribing, and it seemed to be working.

Lo and behold, there is an unsubscribe button on most of these mailings. The trick is finding it. The graphics show in real scale and color the headline, and the unsubscribe button. One is obviously the first thing you see and the other, the last.

Bonus round- when you unsubscribe, they send you a confirming email, sort of a last slap in the face. Who knew?

Of Barbers and Haircuts

2008-12-17T11:42:00.002-05:00

In the year or two that prices for stocks and houses have been cratering, have you noticed they are always forecast to improve in a few months? It’s been years. Why do we keep listening to the experts when they keep being wrong? Ever notice the experts who offer these forecast for stock recovery work with what used to be investment banks? Notice that the folks saying the time to buy a “home” is now are generally builders and realtors? (Didn’t it used to take love, not just a realtor to make a house a home?) Remember all the credit card offers sent to you, your kids and the dog? The credit card companies are now shocked, shocked that people would be human and frail and foolish and misuse them.

Billions for advertising, but not one penny for education.

We the sheeple have been fleeced and are now were being asked to pay for the privilege. Next time the flacks tell you to buy a house soon, prices will never be lower, odds are he or she is with the National Association of Realtors. Check it out. Same with ones who say stocks are a bargain. Usually brokers. There’s a reason Warren Buffet is the richest man in the world; he once said, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” And he took his own advice.

Here are some more inconvenient and unconventional truths for you to ponder. This is in fact Great Depression 2. House prices won’t be back to 2006 levels yet by 2016. Real unemployment is already over 10% in reality. (The methods for reporting it are far different than they used to be.) The stock market won’t recover for a decade. Remember 2000 when the NASDAQ hit 5,048, versus today eight and a half years later it’s at 1,445. Buy and hold? Stocks are best in the long term? That’s down over 70 % over nearly a decade! How long did you plan to live? Does your broker still say to buy and hold?

Anyway, we should have seen this coming and a few did, like my friends at iTulip.com. But nobody makes commissions or gets elected by telling the bad news. You’ve been misinformed by highly paid shills who have profited from your misfortune and mistakes. They trashed the hotel room and we get the bill. It’s called a bailout.

The new reality

2008-12-10T10:51:00.002-05:00

There’s no way in hell that the economy we enjoyed for the last 25 years is coming back. No amount of stimulus, tax cutting, free trading or anything else can bring it back. It was an unsustainable bubble created by a deregulated FIRE economy (finance, insurance and real estate), denial of risk and an unprecedented use of credit and debt. It’s amusing to watch the pundits slowly catch on, but only ever so slowly.

The economy of the last 25 years is no more going to bounce back in a year or two than the NASDAQ. It was widely believed in 2000 that the index would be back to its’ peak in a matter of months. I was literally laughed at for saying it could take a decade. Looks like I might have been too optimistic, since at under 1600 it’s off its’ peak of over 5000 by what, about 70%? How’s that Enron stock holding up?

So in my view it’s a given that credit will be very, very much more rare in the future. I’m not sure the credit card companies will be able to survive it, but the rest of us will manage to muddle through. Once again, one will have to save up to buy a car. Doesn’t say much for demand for new cars does it? Sorry Detroit.

Same for flat screen TV’s, video games, computers, MP3 players, cell phones and all the other extras we’ve come to believe we not only need, but deserve. Sorry China. Sorry Best Buy.

I expect to see a lot more cohabiting, and hopefully more niceness. When everyone is skating on thin ice financially, wouldn’t it be nice to see acts of kindness as self-insurance in the case that your situation falls apart? It’s going to be easier to crash in someone’s spare room and help with the rent if you did the same for them before your situations reversed themselves.

Here’s another thought somebody clever will come up with- a value menu at local restaurants. You know, rice and beans for a buck. Maybe takeout only. Maybe with donated ingredients. Food will definitely be viewed and consumed differently. The fast food industry is going to either adapt and change or go the way of the dodo.

The other thing will be housing. There already exists a huge number of foreclosed and vacant houses in America. It’s in nobody’s best interest for them to remain vacant. They represent a nearly worthless asset to the banks that seized them. I believe there’s a great business opportunity for someone to manage renting out rooms in foreclosed houses and getting people housed, as well as getting the banks something for their investment.

Hello? Underemployed real estate workers this is your opportunity!

Trump to God, “You’re fired!”

2008-12-10T10:35:00.002-05:00

On a side note, it seems that no less than Donald Trump has weighed in on the causes of the current financial meltdown. Could it be irresponsible borrowing and lending? Unregulated and exotic financial instruments? Pure and simple greed?

No! The Donald informs us that it is an act of God, which conveniently gets him out of some no longer profitable contract over loans with banks. Sweet! When I was a kid, Flip Wilson’s tag line was, “The Devil made me do it.” Apparently this time, it’s the Deity.

Hunger

2008-12-09T10:26:00.004-05:00

I wonder how Americans will handle hunger. I don’t think most of us ever really had to deal with it. In the spring of 1983 (during the last nasty recession, but nothing like this one) I can remember lying in my bed in a cheap ass flop house hotel in Santa Barbara, California on a Wednesday trying to decide whether to spend my last seventy five cents till payday on Friday on a can of beans or bus fare. Eating the beans would mean a two hour walk to work, which was what I chose, but overall what I remember is the overwhelming helplessness of having a Bachelors degree from a great school and making three bucks an hour moving furniture and being so damn hungry.

Even better, I got fired from that job for having an attitude. As I recall, the supervisor had me stacking chairs in what I thought was a dumb place, and I suggested a different area. I was told to shut up and follow orders. Later, he realized he’d made a mistake, and asked me what the hell I’d been thinking. I told him at three bucks an hour, he couldn’t afford my brains, and that was it. I got canned.

In Santa Barbara, there were plenty of avocado and orange trees, so you could at least put some food in your mouth in the worst circumstances, but still it’s a really bad place to be when you don’t have enough to eat. I fear we’re entering an era where a lot of Americans are going to get their first taste (pardon the irony) of hunger. There’s really no reason to think it will be pretty.

Not sure what the way to deal with it should be. I suppose since most churches have kitchen facilities that they’ll be a likely candidate for feeding the community. They had soup kitchens in the 30’s in a lot of places, which makes sense since you can make soup out of anything and everything. Hell, I can cook. Maybe that will be my new profession: soup kitchen chef.

In a place like small town Maine it’s not hard to imagine how to put together a program like this. The Rotary, the churches, the town and the Chamber of Commerce could likely all be counted on to provide the basics to feed people a few times a day. The trick would be to stay humble and respectful of those down on their luck, and by God the people of Lincoln county Maine are certainly up to the task.

I wonder how the rest of the nation will fare?

First Snow

2008-12-07T14:51:00.001-05:00

No rant just now. I drove to Damariscotta and back, and it all looks like a postcard. This is for our more southerly relatives and friends, which would be pretty near all of them.

Proportionality, part deux

2008-12-07T10:40:00.004-05:00

Okay, so both my readers are familiar with two recurring pet peeves of mine, which would be proportionality and the global war on terror. I ran across a factoid that makes the two come together in an interesting way. The Bush Administration has come damn near a preemptive war with Iran to prevent them from getting nuclear arms. The morons in charge want us to believe it’s the absolute biggest threat in the world for a Muslim nation to have nukes, and Obama has even nodded to it. (Oh wait. Pakistan has them and they’re an ally. Ignore this, please.) While a nasty concept, there are worse things in the world than Iran with nukes. We faced thousands and thousands of nukes in the USSR for decades, including most of my life, and nothing bad happened. And they were VERY advanced and VERY well tested.

So here’s the factoid that makes the whole matter so ridiculous. The nuke that North Korea set off (and they are WAY ahead of Iran) was estimated at equivalent to 400 tons of TNT. Oooh. Sounds scary. But it turns out that a fully fueled 757 like the ones that hit the WTC each packed the equivalent of 900 tons of TNT. Large commercial aircraft are common as dandelions, and with the airlines in meltdown, they’re downright affordable.

Get my drift? The biggest freaking threat in the world is a loose (likely extremely unsophisticated) nucular (sic) weapon, worth another preemptive war, but anybody and his cousin can buy a used large airliner and fly it wherever they want. When we were in Tucson last year we saw the huge airplane mothball yard, and it goes on forever. Lots of planes out there if anyone needs one.

Once again, the desire to make us blindly fearful, and the lack of seeing things in proportion leads to ridiculous policies.

And another thing. Last week Peggy Noonan wrote an obnoxious column with the basic idea being that, “Say what you want about W, he kept us safe.” And all of the Democrats fear that two words will be added, “unlike Obama.”

These smug assholes love to use the line that since we haven’t been hit again yet, that W deserves credit. I can usually shut this one up by asking if the speaker will take an oath to switch parties in the event of an attack on American soil. No takers yet. And here’s the punch line- if George W. Bush kept us so fucking safe, what’s he got to say to the families of the nearly 3,000 dead in Manhattan, Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, not to mention over 4,200 dead Americans in Iraq? The attacks on the World Trade Center were on his watch after he ignored Clinton administration warnings. In their arrogance, any concern of the Clinton’s was deemed unimportant. Thanks, assholes.

He kept us safe? More like he tattooed targets on our foreheads.

Next Job

2008-12-05T11:32:00.000-05:00

It has been stated that in the nearly 8 years since he left office, Bill Clinton has pulled down $110 million in speaking and consulting fees. This says a lot about how his judgment and policies are viewed, widely and globally.

How many people do you suppose will pay to hear W speak? There were times when I would have paid him to shut up, but I’m not exactly smack in the middle of his demographic. I just can’t imagine having to explain to shareholders why you spent perfectly good money for advice from the worst President in history. Poor sap. Some right wing think tank will probably give him a title, a stipend and a strong warning against opening his mouth in public or leaving the US.

That poor bastard Alberto Gonzalez couldn’t find work in the private sector for almost a year, and it’s a temporary gig.

Gee, maybe they were right about one thing. A free market tells you what people think you’re worth. And these buckos ain’t worth diddly.

Dumb and dumber

2008-12-03T16:19:00.004-05:00

Okay, that last post got me thinking about racists and ignorance in general, so I thought I’d check out the mother lode: www.kkk.bz. Holy crap, they’re even dumber than I expected. On the home page, they refer to Omaha, NB, which I’m pretty sure, would be in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Nope, it’s our own Nebraska, NE for short. The banner headline reads, “THE KNIGHTS IS LEADING THE WAY”. Hopefully they is headed for an English lesson.

Here’s another gem, “DO NOT be fooled! The Knights Party is the ONLY legitimate Klan association in the United States. We are not some fringe fly by night group of disgruntled losers who decided to start a "Klan" group.“ That’s pretty funny coming from a fringe group of disgruntled losers.

Honestly, can you think of a group of losers more pathetic and ridiculous than the Klan?

Supremely Ridiculous

2008-12-03T10:14:00.001-05:00

So here I am trying to figure out what the hell to write about. The Huffington Post had a link to a David Duke white supremacy site, and it occurred to me that the attendees at white supremacist meeting look to be some of the least supreme people I’ve ever seen. Definitely ignorant, unlikely to be educated, successful only in the sense of not having starved to death yet.

The focus currently of such groups is the problem with the guy about to enter the White House. How many of the posters on stormfront.org do you suppose went to Harvard Law School, or could have gotten in? I’m thinking damn few. Maybe instead of white supremacy they should call it personal insecurity and be done with it.

I’m so sick of these morons that I’m hoping we can just flush all the racists and be done with it. Go public, get bitch slapped, repeat.

Hell, I’m a 13th generation American, mostly English with some Dutch thrown in, and in traveling around the world I sure didn’t find that the white ones were better or smarter than the tan ones, the olive ones, the brown ones, the black ones or anyone else. If I had to admit to any racism it might be that Asians are smarter than the rest of it. But then again, I think it’s for cultural, rather than racial reasons. But honestly, if you look at the racial makeup of the University of California, you gotta think them Asians got something on whitey, but you don’t see them forming “Yellow Power” movements, even though they could probably statistically prove superiority. Sheesh.

Yikes! It's worse than I thought!

2008-12-02T16:16:00.004-05:00

Okay, I knew there was going to be a really nasty, long and slow recovery for the financial system, and I’ve been accused of being Chicken Little more than once, but all I can say is Holy Fucking Shit. My bud, Eric Janszen (third smartest man in the world) posted a bit over on iTulip that explains why none of the injecting, pumping and flooding of cash into the financial system can do any good. The piece requires a rudimentary knowledge of economics as well as financial and monetary policy, but the guts of it are as follows.

I made much the same case a few days back but when Eric tells it it’s more compelling and scary. Basically, the major banks shared their risks by buying and selling each other credit default swaps (CDS) so if their bets went bad, somebody would bail them out. An excellent metaphor in a comment on Eric’s post states that it was like a bunch of swimmers tying themselves together far at sea for safety, and then immediately take on more weight than they can handle, thus all sinking together. Basically and collectively they owe more money than there is in the world, something like most of a quadrillion dollars. That’s $1,000,000,000,000,000.00.

Hence the “Holy Fucking Shit” comment above. That’s about $150,000 for every man, woman and child on earth, or about three million dollars for every American. That much money simply does not exist. The American, and therefore global financial system is dead. Kaput. Finished. And no bailout is going to help.

Man! This thing is unwinnable. If you have any dollars at all, and live in a first world country, this stuff is really important to learn and understand.

Figures lie and liars figure

2008-12-02T10:42:00.001-05:00

There are any number of pundits out there in Punditistan who remind us why this isn’t the Great Depression 2. There are no bread lines, no hoboes, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, we are so near the beginning of a long, long process. There were no soup kitchens in 1929 and 1930 saw one of the greatest stock market rallies ever.

I read a great bit of wisdom from some old English dude, whose name escapes me, “We leap into debt, and crawl out of it.” I think the whole GDII thing is like that. When your neighbor loses her job, it’s a recession. When you lose yours, it’s a depression.

So anyway, one of the pearls of wisdom being cast before the swine (present company excepted) is that unemployment is “only” six and a half percent. Jeez, when I got out of college it was over ten percent. (Remind me to whine about how much that sucked.) Here’s a little inside baseball. There are many different unemployment numbers. Really.

The “official unemployment rate” is technically known as U3. Over time it has been twisted to make things seem better than they are. It does NOT include discouraged workers, part time employees who want fulltime work and marginally employed workers. These folks are however counted in U6, which is the number they never tell you about. They used to, but not anymore, so any historical reference (“It was much worse back then”) is either misleading or patently false. How’s that for a pisser? They think we’re stupid, and unfortunately, they’re usually right.

Here’s the deal. For October 2008, the “official” U3 unemployment rate was 6.5%, which is high, but not historically. The more accurate, and underreported U6 unemployment rate was 11.8%, and that my friends is a nasty number. No bread lines. Yet. No hoboes. Yet. No food riots. Yet.

Let’s take care of each other, remember the neediest and share what you have with those who need it. It’s a great time to short the market, but a lousy time to short karma.

Cold and dark

2008-11-30T14:41:00.001-05:00

Here we are in beautiful East Boothbay, Maine where the son is pretty much below the trees by 3:30, and it’s not even December yet. The dogs refuse to believe their suppertime is after dark (at 5pm) because as Florida dogs, they don’t know about sunsets before about 6. The scenery is really great, and we’re down to the hardcore full-timers since most of the seasonal people have gone away. Sources vary, but it looks like we have about 2,500 year round residents and as many as 30,000 in summer. I’ve walked into more than a few restaurants in the last month and realized I knew everyone there. Kind of cool, and kind of weird.

It’s been really cold as well, and it’s odd to see the 500 feet of so of ice at the end of the Little River. The dogs tend to jump over frozen puddles, which is funny and Sophie likes to break through the ice and pick up pieces of it. Better than rocks.

I had to visit Harvey for the monthly running of the engine and generator. Waves of nostalgia washed over me, and I realized we’d had this rig for a year and a few days. What a monstrous marvel that coach is. Next year, we’re planning another trip to Mexico and I can hardly wait.

Yesterday, in Damariscotta, we stopped by in time to catch Santa Claus riding into town in a horse drawn wagon. He was heralded by (I kid you not) the Reny’s Rockettes. Just another day in small town Maine. The way life should be.

Sacrifice, Sharing and Compassion: We Can Relearn

2008-11-27T14:17:00.002-05:00

There’s a strong stubborn, individualistic strain that runs through the American psyche, and it can often represent the best and the worst in us. It’s most egregious variety, and more and more observable these last 25 years is the idea that both the rich and the poor deserve what they have. In a new book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers” he explains how nobody gets where they are through their own doing, especially at the very high ends of wealth. Bill Gates had access to a computer terminal in 1969. (I first touched one in 1974, but access was severely limited.) Because of a wealthy family and a years long head start, he was able to do quite well for himself. As I’m fond of saying, with his poor eyesight, he wouldn’t have survived to puberty in sixth century Somalia.

In the coming difficult years, we as a nation are going to have to find ways to help each other out, sacrificing some of our own time and resources for the betterment of others.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I just attended an extraordinary event that is hard to imagine anywhere else. A friend runs the most popular restaurant in our little town, and for Thanksgiving he serves an awesome gourmet Thanksgiving dinner for anyone to attend and it’s all FREE. Instead of a check, you get an envelope in which you can make a donation to the local Meals on Wheels. Portions are huge; Liz and I left with 4 of those big takeout boxes. It could feed us for days.

The beauty part is since Mainers are proud people, the hungry ones have a hard time asking for help. If someone spots you at the food pantry, it’s embarrassing. If your extended family is chowing down at McSeagulls, no one has to know that you only put a dollar in the envelope, and no one is the wiser. Plus, you can take home enough food to feed a hungry family for weeks. The wait staff and cooks volunteer their time, and often the food is provided at cost or free to the restaurant. It’s a great tradition, and it let’s those of us doing pretty well a chance to give back to people who need help, and nobody has to know what anyone puts in the envelope.

If we’re going to survive as a people and a nation, there’s going to need to be a hell of a lot more of this going on. We need to stop resenting the needy for their needs and start being thankful for just how incredibly fortunate we all are.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Proportionality

2008-11-27T10:53:00.004-05:00

Probably “statistics” would have been a more appropriate heading, but what the hell. I have a pet peeve about proportionality, and especially the federal government, the man on the street and the media’s inability to have a perspective on the scale of disasters and other historical events. The Bush Administration has taken this to crazy level, spending literal trillions to prevent another 3,000 dead Americans, whereas that much money could save hundreds of thousands, more likely millions of lives if applied to medical research. (Stem cell, anyone?)

On 9/11, I was in London for a board meeting, and I’ll never forget the hours spent staring at the TV in my hotel room. The most bizarre part was watching a CNN interview at a Wal-Mart in South Dakota. A woman who must have weighed 300 pounds was sucking on a cigarette and telling the reporter, “You couldn’t get me into one of those deathtraps” referring to commercial aircraft. I’m thinking diabetes, heart disease and cancer are much more appropriate concerns, but that’s the way most people have come to think. Just be afraid of the last thing you heard about on the news or talk radio or wherever oblivioids get their misinformation.

Economics is the study of scarcity. If there’s enough of something, there’s no market for it, like air for example. The free market does one thing pretty well, and that is to set a price for stuff. One key shortcoming is that there is no market for public safety or national defense. How much we spend is based on policy decisions by the current rulers and reflects their mindset and worldview. For the last eight years, we’ve tried to become the Death Star, Fortress America, and Fort Apache.

Costa Rica dismantled its’ military in 1948, and they’ve never had a problem with it. Average incomes are 1500% (yup, fifteen times) neighboring Nicaragua’s, and they have a better health care and education system than we do, not to mention longer life expectancy. I’m not saying we need to completely dismantle the military, but is it really necessary to spend more than the rest of the world combined?

Here’s another stumper. In the last decade, around 3,000 Americans have died in terrorist attacks. Every day, it’s estimated that around the world about 30,000 children starve to death. A decade is 3,562 days, so for our 3,000 killed, there were over ten million children starved to death. So over 36,000 kids starved for every American killed in a terror attack. Doesn’t that make it seem a little silly to focus so completely on this stupid Global War On Terror? Maybe a little more help with food aid? How the hell does a country in which most citizens claim to be Christians get its’ priorities so completely fucked up? The Big Guy famously said, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” How the hell do you square that with Bush doctrine and actions?

Even if you take the logic at face value, it’s more than a little hard to buy the sense of proportionality. Suppose you lose a hundred thousand Americans in a nuclear terror attack on a large urban center EVERY YEAR. That would make terrorist attack the sixth leading annual cause of death, behind heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents, and barely ahead of diabetes.

I can’t find the data, but it sure as hell seems like we’re spending more in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11), Afghanistan and in the Department of Homeland Security (doesn’t “Homeland” kind of smell like a swastika?) than we are working to prevent heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents? How does this make any sense if you have even the vaguest sense of proportionality?

The size of the problem

2008-11-26T17:19:00.001-05:00

The problem with this financial tsunami is getting the average dude/chick on the street to grasp just what madness the monsters of Wall Street and Greenwich have put us in and just how hard it will be to get out of. Plain and simple, debt is not wealth. But it was treated that way for the last 25 years, and the result if all the borrowing and crazy, highly leveraged (that means borrowing by the truckload) derivative deals.

The sub-prime mortgage is peanuts compared what these Wall Street wizards have come up with. Remember, the motivation here is that you get a big chunk of winnings if you win, and at worst you lose your job if you don’t.

Think about it. Someone hands you $100 in a casino, and tells you can keep 20% of the winnings, and if you lose you have to leave the casino. Logically, you want to make the highest paying bet, no matter the odds. I’d drop it on roulette; it pays 17 to 1. So you take a shot and win 20% of $1800, or $360. Sweet! You made more than you bet. Now add in the concept of being able to borrow $10,000 because you have that original bet. Win now and your personal payday is $36,000. Lose now, and you don’t just leave the casino, you owe it $10,000.

That almost exactly what happened on Wall Street with something called a credit default swap, or CDS. It works like insurance for corporate bonds, but you buy them whether you have the bond or not. Like buying life insurance on someone else. There are an estimated $65,000,000,000,000 (sixty-five trillion dollars) worth of these out there, and nobody is sure who or where they are. To compare, every mortgage in America adds up to about $13,000,000,000,000 (thirteen trillion dollars).

When the CDS market collapses (as it must) the net losses are FIVE TIMES the effect of every home in America with a mortgage gets foreclosed and never sold again. Fun stuff, huh? Now get this; the CDS market is only about 10% of the total derivatives market, estimated at $650,000,000,000,000 (six hundred trillion dollars).

To sum up, the toxic loans, deals and derivatives on the books of the world’s banks, pension funds, college endowments are worth fifty times the value of every mortgage in America. The current economic decline cannot end until this debt goes away. One teeny problem is that there isn’t this much money in the world. This is so much more than any sub-prime mortgage, and the next asshole who tells me it’s the fault of lefty do-gooders helping poor people houses they couldn’t afford and political contributions by Fannie and Freddie is gonna get hit.

This sums it up

2008-11-26T16:32:00.001-05:00

War is good for the economy like cannibalism is nutritious.

Timeframes to fix things

2008-11-25T10:55:00.004-05:00

My brother posted a comment that really is worth a full on rant. It was also the inspiration for the short prohibition rant, so thanks for that, Bubba. The chattering class and the Sabbath gasbags seem to be treating the current economic crisis as something that can be turned around by Christmas. If we just figure out which lever to pull, everything will be fine and we’ll be refinancing our houses for flat screen TVs and all will be well with the world. No, no, no, a thousand times no.

Anyone who’s been listening to me the last, what 4 or 5 years, knows I expect the end of capitalism and our living standards as we’ve know them the last quarter century. Anyone under 50 has never been an adult in a REAL recession, and I can tell you they suck big time. I got out of college and started looking for work the exact month unemployment hit its post WWII peak at almost 10%.

Let me tell you that sucks big time. The guy cleaning the Slurpee machine at 7-11 had a PhD in physical chemistry. No shit. I moved furniture for $3 an hour for six months, with a freshly minted BA in Economics from a snotty New England college, hustled my ass off and got nothing but hundreds of rejection letters.

Anyway, compared to the 1930’s and the shit coming down the pike, that was a walk in the park. In the immortal words of Bob Marley, a hungry mob is an angry mob. When was the last time you saw a mob of hungry Americans? Sure there are pockets of poverty that bad in America, but when it’s all you’ve ever know, it’s different. I’m talking former real estate agents, former bankers, former hedge fund quants, real live hungry, angry, no make that furious, previously spoiled and entitled upper-middle class Americans actually spending days, weeks and months without nearly enough to eat. How pissed will they be? How pissed would you be? I know how pissed I’d be, and I’m not even the violent type.

How can an American administration react in the face of widespread, I mean really widespread, Dustbowl style poverty and hunger? I’m one hell of a lot more optimistic about Obama/Biden handling it than Bush/Cheney. (Concentration camps? Americans at Gitmo?)

Think about it, we can’t just have thousands of Americans living on the streets, on a constant prowl for food. Churches have always pissed me off by their very existence, as they represent a waste of resources for a guy who doesn’t need a house, being empty 99% of the time and NOT providing for people who really need shelter. Maybe to keep their tax-exempt status, the churches would be required to offer up half of their total floor space for people needing a roof over their heads.

I can hear the squeals of complaint about socialism and God helps those who help themselves and why don’t they just get jobs. Such has become the state of the church in America. If anyone cares to actually read the New Testament, I can’t think of anything Jesus would more approve of, but I guarantee not 1% of American Christian churches, in a nation housing crisis and in the midst of Great Depression 2, will open their doors to people needing a place to crash. On second thought, the Unitarians would, but they aren’t “real” Christians anyway.

Imagine thousands of acres of tents, pallets of MRE's, virtual refugee camps right here in the good ol' US of A. Imagine the politics of this country would change in a way that will make the last election look like a reelection.

Bottom line here is that we are in for a very rough 8 or 10 years, that very few living Americans can recall or even imagine. I wonder how we’ll get through it? We’ll certainly see the best and the worst of people, cuz nothing brings out one’s true nature like true need.

A new 21st amendment

2008-11-25T10:14:00.003-05:00

The prohibition against alcohol in the United States ended in 1933. While it didn’t immediately end the Great Depression, it sure took the edge off and put a lot of gansters out of business. Suddenly an entirely new (sort of) industry developed with jobs, taxes and all that good stuff. Wouldn’t it be a nice idea to pick up a $100 billion in new taxes given how we’re throwing cash at every banker with a tin cup, which would be all of them? The marijuana crop market value is hard to pin down, but the DEA finds $100 billion to be a good guess. Regulate it, tax it, sell it, voila! We lose a lot of nasty gang and mafia activity, help out the agricultural sector, and save a bloody fortune chasing down nonviolent people and incarcerating them.

I’ve seen in estimated that 80% of the US prison population are in for nonviolent drug offences. The annual cost seems to be around $48 billion. Honestly, when will we just wake up and legalize and tax the stuff? It’s not like it’s off our streets. It’s freaking everywhere!

Full on Depression, part deux

2008-11-24T14:54:00.010-05:00

It’s remarkable how much of the punditry has been getting this economy so wrong for so long and people keep booking them as experts, people buy their books and take their advice on faith. They are condescending and so often so wrong. Here’s a Fox News tidbit: “The Dow Jones industrial average is down more than one-third from its high a year ago. The stock market lost 89% of its value from its peak during the Great Depression.”

Okay, we’re down 50% now (the article was from last month) after a single year, but from 1929 to 1932 it went down 89%. Apples to apples my journalists Chernobyls. Let check back in 2 years, shall we? Next, of course, it’s not the GD ‘cause there aren’t soup lines. A more accurate assessment would have ended that sentence with the additional word, “yet”.

Next comes “buy and hold” as an investment strategy for US equities. I got out in the 90’s and never got back in. Let’s see, I got out of stocks just about 10 years ago this month. If I had bought and held, how would I be doing? Considering the fact that it was mostly WorldCom stock, it would have dropped to zero.

How about the Dow Jones? 99% of financial advisor would tell a 55-year-old man in 1998 to be in stocks in a big way. At 65, this year, there have to be a hell of a lot of people feeling like they played by the rules, but got screwed anyway. Not even counting interest and it was not a clever move.

Here’s an average guy doing pretty well. Let’s see what he’s got. In 1998, he buys a modest $250,000 house with a 30 year fixed mortgage at 9%, with 20% down. He has a solid $100,000 in his retirement fund (above average in US), and feels better and better about life as retirement approaches. Actually, he’s feeling downright smug. Flash forward 10 years.

As the kids needed to pay for college, it was handy to refinance as the value of the home shot up, reaching $600,000 a few years back. No need to stuff as much money into the retirement fund, since we’re feeling house rich. Make contribution of $2,000 a month and enjoy the rest. You’ve earned it. Time to refi for that sporty little Mercedes he’d been eying, and the feeling that with the house getting so valuable, the $500,000 in total mortgage and home equity lines of credit was handle able.

$100,000 in the Dow on November 27, 1998 would be worth $80,909 by last night’s close. The Dow went from 9334 to 7552 in those 10 years. The $2000 annual contributions get him almost all the way back to the $100,000 he started with back in 1998, but ravaged by fees and inflation.

Now the house, valued at $350,000 is seriously underwater with $500,000 in loans on it, and his almost $100,000 retirement fund can’t cover the gap. Welcome to the new retirement folks. Entering retirement with a net worth well below zero is going to be a bitch. And common. And heartbreaking for people who just did what they were told to.

We need a better social safety not to mention a social contract, and some of the big winners of the last quarter century are going to have to cough it up to pay for it. The rich bastards talk a good game, but they’ll fold like a house of cards the first time pictures like this surface. Visualize the scene of a public barbecue. Children playing, people drinking beer and sharing potluck. Men are taking turns with the handle on the spit. There are a few cops and the ambulance guys are there and it’s all pretty festive. That’s when you notice the body on the spit over the coals with the apple in it’s mouth is the field dressed body of the abusive rich bastard who closed the local factory and sent the work to China to save a few pennies on labor. No jury anywhere in the new America would convict anyone involved. The arrogant few who have been raping America these last decades talk tough, but the tough talk stops when they stop to realize what real class warfare looks like.

Full on Depression

2008-11-24T11:15:00.002-05:00

This morning I was talking to an entrepreneur who has been so buried in his work that he didn’t realize what the economy looked like. Cool product, sort of Garage Band on FaceBook, but what a time to be looking for money! Citibank can’t borrow money (except from the government), so I’m pretty sure pre-revenue start-ups will be in a tough patch.

We’re really seeing the shit hit the fan in real live America. What must it feel like to spend your entire working life to put away a few hundred thousand in the old 401(k) and have a house that’s gone up so that you’re damn near a millionaire in 2006 at age 63 and ready for a happy retirement? 2 years later, you’re upside down on the house, and the 401(k) has fallen over 50%. Holy crap! That must grab one’s attention.

I continue to be amazed that no one is shooting up the banker that did the mortgage or the broker who advised to buy and hold US stocks and all the other nonsense that’s been spoon-fed by billions in advertising by the morally bankrupt finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) businesses. It is difficult to imagine just how different the US economy will look after this debacle. We’re definitely past the age of the unregulated free market triumphalism that has haunted us since Reagan, but it’s hard to figure out what will take its place.

My truck

2008-11-21T11:04:00.000-05:00

Early Bird

2008-11-20T10:40:00.002-05:00

Here in the Greater Boothbay Region of Midcoast Maine, there’s a tradition I’ve not seen elsewhere (actually, quite a few, but that’s another story). Saturday is “Early Bird”. At 6 am, the people of the town show up downtown in pajamas and bathrobes and shop. Yup, they shop. Prices are cheap, and usually the earlier, the bigger discount. When we went two years ago, one shop was selling gift certificates worth $100 the next August for $50 in November. Obviously they needed the money in November and could afford the giveaway in August. That being said, the store actually shut down. Oh well.

Anyway, two years ago when Liz and I first went, we had a bad moment halfway to town worrying that we’d been pranked, but sure enough, bright and early on a Saturday morning, the sidewalks were packed with PJ clad people with shopping bags. We stopped in at the favored watering hole around nine for Bloodies and Benedicts. Hanging at the bar in PJs. Is this a great place, or what?

While I’m bragging on the Greater Boothbay Region, we have a problem with the price of lobster collapsing. Apparently the economy and the closure of some large lobster processors in Canada and Iceland resulted in plunging lobster prices like I can remember from the seventies. Getting as little as $1.90 a pound at the dock with fuel at $4.00 a gallon had many of the townsfolk in a world of hurt. This being Boothbay, and this being Maine, the community organized a big lobster sale; five bucks each, cooked or live. It was to start at 9am at the High School and go all day.

Well, the line started forming at 7:30am and by 1:00pm there were no lobsters left. Seven thousand lobsters sold and they could have sold thousands more. This in a town with a year round population of about three thousand. Mainers really come together to help each other out, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier living out a depression in Maine than in most parts.

Thanks to all in Boothbay for letting us join this sweet and gracious community we’ve come to love so well.