OBAMA'S NEW BANK BAILOUT PLAN

The New York Times' resident Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on the latest version of the bank bailout plan:

Financial Policy Despair

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

And

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

More here.

So what Obama is proposing is a public-risk/private-profit venture. If these unnamed investors picked by the government to buy up what economist and uber-blogger Atrios calls "Big Shitpile," that is, the mortgage-backed toxic assets, manage to make some money in the process, they get to keep it, if they lose money, however, they've lost taxpayer money, our money, not theirs.

How can this possibly be described as harnessing "the expertise of the market"? Market incentives simply do not apply in this situation. To these investors, it's Monopoly money, free money to wheel and deal, with no chance of loss. For them, anyway. To the American people, however, these probable losses are very real, indeed.

Look, the bottom line here is that most of the money lost in these toxic assets is gone forever, burned up by the bursting of the real estate bubble, and the only way out is for the government, the American taxpayer, to eat the loss. The only question is how we're going to eat it. What Obama and his Treasury team of Wall Street insiders want is to preserve, as much as possible, the banking and finance system that caused the mess in the first place, and to spread around to these people as much wealth as possible, greatly upping the ante on what capitalists call "moral hazard," or more simply, rewarding lunatic financial behavior with cold hard cash, thereby guaranteeing that lunatic financial behavior will continue.

There's gotta be a better way.

Krugman briefly spells out the time honored solution to such crises: the government guarantees much of this debt for solvent banks, while taking over and reorganizing insolvent banks. Historically, this works. Yes, taxpayers would take a huge loss, as we did during the S&L crisis of the late 80s, but the traditional route deals directly with the "moral hazard" problem, removing permanently the financial entities that caused the crisis, and does so much more efficiently, spending less taxpayer money, than the bizarre Monopoly money scheme Obama's banker pals are proposing.

If President Obama is really serious about this harebrained plan, I think it is now safe to say that in many ways he is little better than Herbert Hoover was during the opening years of the Great Depression. Or George W. Bush during the last eight years. Okay, in many ways Obama is actually better than Bush, who would have tried to tax cut us out of this Great Recession, but for this crisis, the financial and banking crisis, Obama is exactly the same as Bush. That is, like Bush, Obama is Wall Street's man.

And that's change I cannot believe in.

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AMERICAN VENGEANCE

From Hullabaloo courtesy of Eschaton, blogger Digby opines on one crusading reporter's reaction to former California Congressman Gary Condit's recent exoneration of his former intern and lover's 2001 murder:

The man is gulty of having an affair, which destroyed his life, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy. Gary Condit didn't even break any laws. But DePaulo still insists that he is some sort of sociopath --- and excuses her own disgusting behavior by comparing his "crime" to homicide saying he deserved the twisted obsession in which she and her cohorts drowned themselves that horrid summer. (But then that particular illness had been prevalent in Washington for some years at that point, hadn't it?)

I submit that she is the one with the problem, a big one. And it's a problem that renders her incapable of being a reliable journalist. If she cannot see that wrongly accusing someone of being a murderer requires a serious reevaluation of where she went wrong and a sincere apology for doing it, then she can't be trusted. She obviously has no ethical compass.

This horrible little screed is the most vivid example of everything that's wrong with American journalism I've seen in quite some time --- the adolescent shallowness, the shrill sanctimony, the arrogance with which they wield their power, the sheer immorality of wrongly accusing someone of a heinous crime and feeling absolutely no remorse.

More here.

Yes, well, arrogance and stupidity often walk hand in hand, especially for bigtime journalists, as comedian Jon Stewart continually observes. But what's really disturbing here is the corporate news media's tendency to pander to America's lust for vengeance. CNN's former prosecutor and professional cunt Nancy Grace is an obvious example, as was all the media cheerleading for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this shit is all over the journalistic landscape: cute little Ashleigh Banfield is currently advocating hard prison time for teens who send or forward naughty pics of themselves through cyberspace. Creepy.

Really, what's most disturbing of all, however, is that Americans are in love with revenge, and that sacrificial scapegoats sate this hunger well. I mean, this is a cultural strain that goes all the way back to the Salem witch trials. You'd think that a nation as sophisticated and advanced as ours would have long ago come to the realization that vengeance is utterly useless, counterproductive even. Revenge doesn't do anything good at all: it doesn't make the streets safer; it doesn't reduce crime; it doesn't reverse the effects of crime; it doesn't bring back murdered loved ones; it doesn't make anyone rest easier at night. It does nothing but perpetuate anger and hatred. Crime, too, for that matter.

So if vengeance is so counterproductive, why do we love it so much? Answer: "'Vengeance is mine,' thus sayeth the Lord." Christianity, which oozes from the pores of all Westerners, whether they're Christians or not, especially Americans, is all about revenge. The entire system of thought is based on revenge: indeed, Hell is the ultimate manifestation of God's vengeance. That's what the universe is about, avoiding or receiving God's vengeance. And such theology is deeply embedded in Western thought. Americans love seeing bad things happen to people we hate, and Americans hate lots of people.

I'd like to blame this on the fundamentalists, who are particularly bloodthirsty, but the notion of revenge is so widespread, so popular, it just wouldn't be fair--besides, some fundamentalists are starting too see writing on the wall that says their era is kaput, and I have no doubt that American Vengeance will be with us for many years to come. No, vengeance, as a philosophy of right and wrong, is extraordinarily secular at this point. And it's just awful.

As the Klingons say, "vengeance is a dish best served cold." Or not at all.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy in sleepy love



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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U.S. births broke record in 2007; 40% were out of wedlock

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.

For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.

Even happy couples may be living together without getting married, experts say. And more women — especially those in their 30s and 40s — are choosing to have children despite their single status.

And

Meanwhile, U.S. abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have attributed the abortion decline to better use of contraceptives, but other experts have wondered if the rise in births might indicate a failure in proper use of contraceptives. Some earlier studies have shown declining availability of abortions.

Cultural attitudes may be a more likely explanation.

More here.

A few observations.

1. It's time for white racist assholes to shut the fuck up about the problem with black single mothers. This isn't a black problem, if it is indeed a problem at all; this is an American problem. But like I said, it may not even be a problem. If single women want to have children, they should be able to do so without shame or social stigma, and with a great deal of help from the government, you know, free day care, free health care for both mothers and children, for everybody really, steep increases in the minimum wage, which tend to drive up all wages, and on and on. We really need to craft a society that is family friendly. Damned shame that all those "family values" idiots are dead set against such a thing.

2. It's well past time to define the word "family" as being something that includes much more than groups of people consisting of a father, mother, and their children. Really, in practice, that's happened some time ago. It's only the corporate media and asshole politicians who haven't caught up yet. Unfortunately, that also means the law hasn't caught up with reality yet, either.

3. Regardless of whether we have the will or ability to make the US more family friendly, you know that some of these single mothers didn't want to be mothers at all, especially the teenagers: "abstinence based" sex education has got to go, got to be replaced by comprehensive sex ed, which teaches kids how to use condoms, and why they are so extraordinarily important, rather than ignoring them, or lying about birth control failure rates. Likewise, forty years of anti-abortion propaganda has to be reversed. There is no shame in having an abortion if you don't want to be pregnant. Society shouldn't guilt people into having children they don't want.

And if we can get everybody on the birth control bandwagon, abortion, as an issue, would be exceedingly rare in incidence. Why can't the "pro-life" people understand that?

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AIG: CORRUPT TO THE CORE

From Newsweek courtesy of Eschaton:

The Next AIG Scandal?

Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn't have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG's reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don't add up. The annual report of one major AIG subsidiary, American Home Assurance, shows that it owes $25 billion to another AIG affiliate, National Union Fire, Gober maintains. But American has only $22 billion of total invested assets on its balance sheet, he says, and it has issued another $22 billion in guarantees to the other companies. "The American Home assets and liquidity raise serious questions about their ability to make good on their promise to National Union Fire," says Gober, who has a consulting business devoted to protecting policyholders. Gober says there are numerous other examples of "cooked books" between AIG subsidiaries. Based on the state insurance regulators' own reports detailing unanswered questions, the tally in losses could be hundreds of billions of dollars more than AIG is now acknowledging.

And

AIG spokesman Mark Herr took strong exception: "We strongly disagree with Mr. Gober's analysis, which lacks a fundamental understanding of our commercial insurance operations' inter-company risk sharing agreements or even the basics of statutory accounting. Our primary regulators, including New York and Pennsylvania, regularly review our statutory filings as well as our intra-company risk sharing pool, and have raised no objections to this structure. They have repeatedly stated that we have sufficient financial strength to meet our obligations. In fact, in today's hearing on AIG, Joel Ario, Pennsylvania State Insurance Commissioner, commented that the insurance companies of AIG remain strong and well capitalized."

More here.

Right. Well, Enron said pretty much the same thing, "you don't understand." For that matter, Enron was also cooking the books, shifting around balance sheets and accounting deficits between multiple subsidiaries and whatnot in order to hide the fact that it was a paper tiger. And same thing with regulatory agencies: everybody thought Enron was in great shape until the day it no longer existed.

Granted, this potential AIG fraud is suggested by just one guy's analysis, but given the overall Wall Street cultural context, one of outrageous greed mixed with corporate contempt for regulation and reality, as well as the insurance giant's current credit default swap debacle mixed with its bonus scandal, I'd say there's enough here for an investigation. Sadly, as the article observes, there is no such thing as federal insurance regulations; only the states regulate insurance, which means only the states have legal power, at the moment, to look into this.

And that's kind of crazy, too. How is it possible that a firm as enormous as AIG, a firm with octopus tentacles all over the fucking place, is by and large out of the feds' reach? I've known for a long time how terrible neoliberal anti-regulation mania is for the country, but I'm starting to think it's far worse than I could have ever imagined. And what I've already imagined is pretty fucking horrible.

This is all so psychotic.

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BAILOUT FOLLIES GET REALLY FUNNY

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

Cuomo Details Million-Dollar Bonuses at A.I.G

Mr. Cuomo did not name the bonus recipients, but the numbers are eye-popping, given A.I.G.’s fragile state. The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other employees received more than $4 million, according to Mr. Cuomo. Fifteen other people received bonuses of more than $2 million, and 51 people received bonuses of $1 million to $2 million, Mr. Cuomo said. Eleven of those who received “retention” bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at A.I.G., including one who received $4.6 million, he said.

A.I.G., which is now 80 percent owned by the government, paid out the so-called retention payments, saying the bonuses were needed to persuade workers to remain at its financial products unit. But the payouts have caused a public furor, and the White House said on Monday that the Treasury would write new requirements about the bonus money in the next $30 billion that it provides to the insurance giant. Already, the government has given A.I.G. $170 billion.

More here.

Just in case you haven't been following the hairy details of the banking and credit crisis, the reason AIG must be bailed out is that this is the company that insured, via an obscure financial instrument known as a "credit default swap," the majority of those now toxic "mortgage backed" securities. That is, they're now in hock for billions because so many investment banking firms bet the farm on these stupider-than-shit "investments" in subprime loans on houses, many of which are now in foreclosure, and AIG, for a fee, agreed to pay if these bets failed. And when the real estate bubble burst, these bets failed bigtime.

I'm still agog over the sheer stupidity of it all. It was stupid to make mortgage loans to people who couldn't pay them. It was stupid to bundle those loans into "securities" to be bought by investors. It was stupid for ratings agencies to rate these "securities" as triple A, the safest available. It was stupid for investors to buy them. It was stupid for AIG to insure them.

But everybody on Wall Street was in on the game; everybody covered their eyes and ears and pretended that it was going to work out with them getting richer. And because everybody was in on it, the entire system of finance now teeters on the brink of utter disaster. And AIG is at ground zero. If they fail, the whole shithouse caves in. On the whole fucking world.

Only the bailout has forestalled the inevitable. I say "inevitable" because if the White House and Congress continue on their present course, handing over warehouses of money without strings to the greedy idiots who caused the crisis in the first place, the wolves of Wall Street will repeat their mistakes. With our fucking money this time.

That is, AIG is insolvent. We own their ass. They only exist because of massive injections of capital by the Fed. This capital infusion has kept them from going under, and AIG knows it all too well, but they're behaving as if there were no crisis, as if their own actions haven't placed us all in grave economic danger. In many ways, these outrageous bonuses of taxpayer dollars they're handing out are no surprise at all. That's Reaganomics era business-as-usual--for many years now, CEOs of major corporations, for instance, have gotten millions and millions in bonuses whether their companies performed well or not. The whole upper eschalon of corporate capitalist culture is about enriching tribe members at the expense of whoever they can rip off. Historically, it's their workers who have been fleeced, receiving stagnating wages and fewer benefits while their productivity increases, so that executives can party like it's 1999. But right now, with AIG, it's the whole fucking country they're ripping off. And they don't give a fuck what we think about it. They've never given a fuck what anybody thinks about it.

I hope you realize that they've got tribe members working in very high positions in the White House. When the administration first responded to outrage over these bonuses last weekend, the story was along the lines of "well, you know, it's a contract and all, and you just can't break a contract." Never mind the fact that the bailout of the big three automakers forced unions to void their contracts while making wage and benefit concessions--workers aren't part of the tribe; so that's okay. I guess. But the point is that the whole contract issue is bullshit. And once it became clear how pissed off people are about the bonuses, the White House quickly changed its tune.

The bottom line here is that the federal government needs to get serious about resolving the finance crisis. That means raping and pillaging. Taking no prisoners. Nationalizing these "too big to fail" failed institutions. Firing all these assholes who caused the crisis, and who continue to profit from it. I know that some observers, NPR earlier today for instance, assert that these people are the only ones who know enough about the issues involved to actually fix them, but these bankers and executives cannot be trusted. At this point, I'd feel safer if Wall Street was run by third year undergrad accounting students from Big State U--at least they'd cost a whole lot less.

By the same reasoning, Obama needs to fire the entire Treasury Department. They're in the tribe. They're the ones who keep playing footsy, fucking around, handing over mountains of money with no oversight because they won't hurt fellow tribe members, or violate their holy belief in free markets. It's almost funny that they've already violated their own beliefs, but can't come to terms with what they're doing, or summon the willpower to go all the way.

One must now wonder whether President Obama is part of the tribe, too, or if, instead, he made a genuine mistake in hiring these bozos. The latter is forgivable. The former is not.

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ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S NOTORIOUS

From Wikipedia:

Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the American daughter of a convicted Nazi spy, is recruited by government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to infiltrate a group of Germans who have relocated to Brazil after World War II.

While awaiting the details of her assignment in Rio de Janeiro, Alicia falls in love with Devlin. His feelings for her are complicated by his knowledge of her wild past. When Devlin is ordered to convince her to seduce Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of her father's friends and a member of the group, Devlin tries to convince his superiors that Alicia is not fit for the job. But upon seeing Alcia again, he puts up a stoic front, prioritizing duty over love. Alicia concludes that he does not love her, and she eventually weds Alex.

More here.

So I dug up an appropriate Alfred Hitchcock trailer for yesterday's post, and while doing that I came upon one of my favorite Hitch films in full, divided into eleven parts. Notorious isn't brilliant; it's not Vertigo or Psycho or anything along those lines, but it's extraordinarily solid, and a piece of technical virtuosity, especially the interplay between quick cutting and long takes. But really, what it's about to me is the mythical South American post WWII Nazi conspiracy narrative, champagne, Carey Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. It is almost impossible to go wrong with such a combination. In the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, it's pretty badass.

You really ought to watch this.

Here's part one:



Part two.

Part three.

Part four.

Part five.

Part six.

Part seven.

Part eight.

Part nine.

Part ten.

Part eleven.

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The Criminal Injustice System

From CounterPunch, a new essay by former Reagan administration economist and current conservative dissident Paul Craig Roberts:

I am familiar with psychological studies that conclude that eye witness accounts are wrong half of the time. That is enough to discredit eye witness testimony as evidence; yet, police and juries always bank on it.

And

The American criminal justice system is incapable of admitting that it makes mistakes. The criminology bureaucrats claim that those inmates who proclaim their innocence are in denial and, thus, cannot be rehabilitated and, therefore, remain dangerous. In truth, it is the bureaucrats who are in denial and constitute a danger to justice.

And

The criminal justice system has nothing to do with justice. It is a massive producer of injustice. The agenda is to clear court dockets and to produce high conviction rates. These high rates are achieved through coerced plea bargains.

And

On February 12, CBS News reported that two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with sending kids to privately operated detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in payoffs.

And

The US has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the US has 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates. Recent research by the Pew Center concludes that one in every 31 Americans is in prison or jail or on probation or parole.

More here.

I hope and pray that I am never ever ever ever somehow caught up in the grips of this American institution, the criminal justice system, that is clearly and obviously out of control. Roberts does a nice job of touching on some of the major Kafkaesque absurdities and contradictions of the anti-crime industry, but he left out one of the major issues: American "justice" is horrifyingly skewed toward innocent people of color, especially African-Americans; extraordinarily unfair, but fortunate for me, my white skin affords some amount of protection against this bureaucratic monster.

I've posted countless times here at Real Art about how police forces across the nation are often little better than predators. I've posted on how jury duty is for me at best problematic, and at worst immoral. But none of that really gets across the sheer enormity of the scandal: the police and the courts are about processing people, some guilty, some innocent, for reasons that have little to do with determining the truth, little to do with justice. It's all so much more about the careers of cops, judges, lawyers, and politicians, what's good for them. Not about what's good for the people, good for the nation.

This ought to be front page news every fucking day. This ought to be right up there on President Obama's priority list, along with the economy and terrorism. But it's not. Almost nobody is talking about it. For a long time, I've wondered if I'm a bit weird to be so nervous about cops. Increasingly, with each death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence, with each story I read about police misbehavior or bizarre overzealous prosecution, I'm starting to think my fear of police is healthy.

After all, they have the power to upend your life, or take it away permanently, whether you've broken the law or not. And they have legions of people in business suits working for the government ready and gleefully willing to stamp the process with a legal seal of approval.

Ever seen Hitchcock's The Wrong Man? Check out the trailer:



Fiction yes, fantasy no.

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CAUGHT ON TAPE: LAISSEZ FAIRE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

From Comedy Central courtesy of Eschaton, the Daily Show episode everybody's talking about:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

From Merriam-Webster Online:

lais·sez–faire

1 : a doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights

2 : a philosophy or practice characterized by a usually deliberate abstention from direction or interference especially with individual freedom of choice and action

cognitive dissonance

: psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously

A little background. For about a week now, John Stewart has been lambasting cable business news channel CNBC for being wrong about pretty much everything regarding the many years of runup to the financial meltdown and Great Recession we are currently enduring. I've been checking clips of this stuff out over at Crooks and Liars, and it's been a fun ride. But with each successive episode, with each new response from CNBC, Stewart's tone has become incrementally as serious as the subject he has been addressing. That is, it was riotously funny to watch a clip of Jim Cramer touting Bear Sterns stocks a few days before they fell so dramatically that the Fed had to bail them out, riotously funny to see clip after clip of this shit, but after a couple of days, it was just painful: the awful truth, that the mainstream news media is just as responsible for the horrible state of our economy as the Wall Street wolves, corporate lobbyists, and bribe-drunk politicians who poured the gasoline and lit the matches, kind of kicks you in the gut.

As I've said several times here before, comedy is serious business. Or it ought to be.

And this Daily Show episode is no exception. In fact, it's so serious that it gets downright weird. Stewart pounds CNBC's Jim Cramer, former hedge fund manager and host of the network's stalwart show Mad Money, relentlessly, rubbing his nose in his own bullshit again and again. Cramer sputters and stammers, providing no satisfying answers to Stewart's questions.

I mean, short of "look, we're just a propaganda vehicle for Wall Street, and when they blow it, so do we," there are no satisfying answers Cramer can give. I've got to give the man some credit, though. He was nice. He was good natured. He was honest. Okay, he wasn't telling the truth, either, but not because he was lying. That is, in order to lie, one must consciously misrepresent the truth. Cramer is obviously one of those right-wingers, among many, who honestly believes his own bullshit. He's a true blue free market fundamentalist, a neoliberal, a supply-sider, a bigtime cheerleader for the laissez faire economics that have driven this country for the last thirty years. And now the whole theoretical framework has totally fallen apart. Cramer's not a liar, not an asshole. It's just that his beliefs are now utterly at odds with reality, and that hasn't quite set in yet.

He's suffering what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Indeed, most conservatives are suffering cognitive dissonance, and reacting in various ways. Compared to people like, say, Rush Limbaugh, who simply ignores reality and ramps up his anger as a coping strategy, Cramer's reaction is downright uplifting.

It remains to be seen what will come of all this. An entire segment of American society must necessarily now rethink its cosmology, and its own self-worth, if it wants to participate in rebuilding, rather than destroying, the nation. Most of them are not evil assholes like Limbaugh; like Cramer, they're nice people who genuinely believe their now discredited economic ideas are helpful to most Americans. It's kind of sad thinking about twenty million or so fellow countrymen coming to the conclusion that they've unwittingly supported for years ideas, policies, politicians, and institutions that have harmed their country. And that's how this interview with Jim Cramer ultimately makes me feel, sad.

On the other hand, I've always been very much of the opinion that it's not really funny unless someone gets hurt. Judged by that standard, this Daily Show episode is the funniest thing I've encountered in recent memory.

(Hat tip to my buddy Reuben for inspiring me to post on this)

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Dash



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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FAT CAT CORPORATE HONCHOS FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE

From Bloomberg courtesy of Eschaton:

Dimon Says System Can Be Saved If ‘Vilification’ Ends

Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said the U.S. can rescue its banking system by the end of the year if officials start cooperating and stop the “vilification” of corporate America.

And

“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America, I personally don’t understand it,” Dimon said in his speech. “I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because I think it’s hurting our country.”

More here.

It is a legitimate argument to assert that the great things corporations have accomplished outweigh their great misdeeds. I don't know that this is necessarily true, mind you, but it's a reasonable argument to make. After all, corporations, as an economic force, have provided me with this relatively inexpensive computer on which I am now typing. Corporations bring me the wonderful bounty of food I eat everyday. A small corporation currently employs me. And on and on. On the other hand, corporations pollute the environment, subvert our precious democracy, drive us to war, and sometimes straight-up murder people, and get away with it. You get the idea. Interesting argument, lots of good points on both sides.

But to not understand why people would think of corporations as villains places one squarely outside of this reality. In another universe, in fact. In the last decade we've watched as energy corporations used their political leverage to rewrite state regulations, and then gamed them to fleece consumers of billions. We've watched the Enron and Worldcom debacles. We've watched our pets die from eating tainted food; we've suffered through endless E. coli and salmonella scares. We've watched carbon emissions ramp up the greenhouse effect, which is now changing our climate for the worse. We've watched an endless parade of politicians from both major parties accept the legal bribes known as campaign contributions and then repay these favors with countless bad laws.

We've watched irresponsible greedy bankers like Dimon place our entire economy in dire jeopardy.

And Dimon doesn't get why corporations are villanized? Totally from another universe.

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Frank Schaeffer, Author of "Crazy for God" on What's Left of the GOP

From CNN via Crooks and Liars:

HUGHLEY: And you have said some -- you do blog for the Huffington Post. You have written some things and I have read you for a little while. You have written some things that I never heard anybody say out loud. You said the Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or up two up in front of the "TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary, all backward, and there is no global warming, rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated class have long since fled." You believe everybody in the Republican Party is a neocon or an ideologue.

SCHAEFFER: I'd put it differently. I'd say the Republican Party knows that's who that their base is. There are individuals, private citizens ...

HUGHLEY: You mean elected people.

SCHAEFFER: I'm talking either the elected people fall into one of those two categories. Either they are pandering to the religious right -- I don't know what they believe, of course. I can't get into their head. They are pandering to the religion outright or they are pandering to the neocons to whom every war is a good war. And there is very little room in between.

And the people, for instance like William F. Buckley, who was a friend of my dad's, or Barry Goldwater. You could have disagreed or agreed with them. But these were not crazy people. These were not Fruit Loops.

HUGHLEY: They wanted a separation of church and state.

SCHAEFFER: Right. They wanted a separation of church and state. They were not using politics to beat people over the head with a moral crusade. They were not looking to start wars for no reason. We moved from a period where the Republicans represented something you could agree or disagree with, to a period where it represents a kind of fundamentalist Christianity on one side and a view of the world, which sees everyone who is other, whether that is black, white, Arab, Muslim, a different country, gay, as the enemy. And basically that's a very dangerous position.

Click here to watch the interview or continue reading the transcript.

Back in the early 80s when I was a teenage Southern Baptist, I found myself at a winter youth retreat where a youth minister was trying to turn me on to Frankie Schaeffer. "He's an up and coming young evangelist who really knows how to talk to young people, and he's smart, like you. His father is the great evangelist Francis Schaeffer, so Frankie really knows what he's talking about. You really ought to read some of his stuff, Ron." I never got around to reading Frank Schaeffer's evangelical fundamentalist writings, and never really thought about him again, but I never forgot his name--I mean, how could I forget the father/son evangelist team, the thinking man's fundamentalists?

That's why my eyes popped out a couple of years ago when I read that Schaeffer the younger had turned against the right-wing fundamentalist movement he helped his father create. I've been meaning to read up on what his deal is, but haven't gotten round to it until I saw this bit over at C&L. I think that I will now finally read some Frankie Schaeffer.

It's almost impossible for me to not feel some kinship with him. He was there, in the middle of it all, when modern American extremist fundamentalism was born in the mid 70s. He watched with slowly increasing horror as what seemed to him at first to be something good turned into something evil. Of course, because I'm sixteen years younger than he is, I wasn't in the middle of it all like him. But I was a Southern Baptist. I was "saved" in 1980. I was also there, a strong believer, well before the movement unmasked itself publicly to show its demonic face. I, too watched in horror as I came to realize just what these people are all about. And I rejected it all, too. I mean, unlike me, Schaeffer continues to self-identify as Christian, but he converted to the Greek Orthodox Church, which is just about as far from Protestant Fundamentalism as you can get and still legitimately call yourself a Christian.

When I write my anti-fundamentalist screeds here at Real Art, I wonder if people who haven't experienced the evil mind-warping power of the evangelical movement first-hand the way I and Schaeffer have think I'm being too harsh. I wonder if people can understand my intense anger toward fundamentalists. If people can understand my deep sadness about friends and family still clutched tightly within fundamentalist fists.

I think Schaeffer gets it in the way I do. Yeah, I'm gonna read his book.

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Ohio school gets 700 applicants for janitorial job

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Evidence of the slumping economy is stacking up at an Ohio school which has nearly 700 applications for one open janitorial job.

Officials at Perry Local Schools near Canton in northeast Ohio say they've extended the deadline until Monday to accommodate the overwhelming response to the week-old posting.

Click here for more.

Here in the New Orleans area, the economy is still pretty good. I mean, federal and state reconstruction dollars keep rolling in; indeed, NOLA is actually adding jobs, and at a pretty quick pace. I continue to make decent money waiting tables at the slightly upscale corporate chain restaurant where I work. It's easy here, and no doubt elsewhere in the US, to not emotionally grasp the gravity of the economic crisis this nation, the world, is currently facing.

But the above headline pretty much says it all. Janitorial work, especially at public schools, is shit work. Literally. These are the people who have to sprinkle sawdust on vomit and sweep it up. These are the people who have to scrub feces off the ceilings of boys' restrooms. And you have hundreds of people begging to do it.

I saw a spot on the news last night interviewing middle class homeless Californians who have set up a tent city on the same site as a massive tent city built during the Great Depression. These aren't people who fucked up somehow, or with substance abuse problems, or weird Bohemians rejecting mainstream norms. These are hard working Americans who can't find work, and have been thrown out of their homes because they can no longer make rent or afford mortgage payments. People like you and me.

Right now, I'm lucky. Like I said, the economy here, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, has no place to go but up. For now. But this Great Recession is expected to continue well into 2012.

I hope my luck holds out. This is some bad shit.

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THE PRESIDENT IS FAILING

From the New York Times, new Krugman:

So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.

O.K., that’s a warning, not a prediction. But economic policy is falling behind the curve, and there’s a real, growing danger that it will never catch up.

More here.

Republicans have been bashing Obama's stimulus bill relentlessly, from a decidedly neoliberal perspective--you know, not enough tax cuts, let the market enforce its harsh discipline, bad deficit bad! They even pull out the cliched maxim that it was WWII, rather than FDR's New Deal, that pulled us out of the Great Depression, which, to them, means that Keynesian economics, which is the driving philosophy behind the entire concept of economic stimulus, just doesn't work.

I've already addressed elsewhere on this blog the problems with using the economic philosophy that caused this mess, neoliberalism, as the point of view from which to criticize the only mainstream economic philosophy, Keynesianism, that stands a chance of pulling us out. I mean, it's far worse than apples and oranges. So I'll let that lie for today.

But the right wing inadvertantly makes a decent point with the WWII thing. That is, the fact that World War II is what finally ended the Great Depression doesn't at all disprove Keynes' theories. Quite the reverse, in fact. What it shows is that FDR's New Deal spending was too timid. Think about it. During WWII, we were at full employment. Industry was at full capacity. This only happened because the federal government pulled out all the stops. I'm not sure about the actual figures, but I know that war spending dwarfed New Deal spending. The lesson learned here is that when you're trying to head off a depression, you can't let deficit hawks, "socialism" haters, and tax cutters grab your balls and yank. You've got to pop 'em on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and do what needs to be done.

Sadly, frighteningly, President Obama, maybe out of his misguided desire for "bipartisanship," or maybe because he's just too conservative, is failing to do what must be done. The stimulus bill, for all its billions, isn't enough to kickstart the economy. We've got to get it up to WWII levels relative to the overall size of today's economy. And as Krugman asserts, we've got to do it now or Obama's window of opportunity may be forever lost. We really are in that much trouble.

And then there's the banking thing. What I'm reading from actual economists, even conservative economists, is that we've got to nationalize them. Not all of them, of course, just those dubbed "too big to fail," you know, the banks and investment banking firms up to their gills in "toxic assets." I mean, they're "zombie banks," banks that have already failed, kept alive only by these tens of billions both Bush and Obama have been sending their way: these zombie banks are black holes and will continue to burn tax dollars until there are none left to burn. Then it's Road Warrior America.

But President Obama refuses to take over these failed institutions, instead preferring to hand them warehouses full of money. Maybe he's too close to the industry. Maybe he's afraid of being called a socialist, which is already happening, anyway. I really have no idea why he's not doing what most economists are strongly urging.

But I do know that he's fucking up. Badly.

Told ya so.

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THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Doctor McCoy!

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Time change will mess with body's rhythm

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The United States adopted daylight saving time during World War I and II to save energy — electric lights, not candles — and permanently in 1966. Today, there are competing studies on whether energy actually has been saved.

Scientists, however, are beginning to understand that jumping forward even a single hour plays havoc with our circadian rhythms, the biological clocks within our brains and cells.

More here.

And, apparently, there is an increasing number of scientists who believe that this circadian havoc might have some long term negative health consequences. As if the short term consequences weren't bad enough. Even though I don't have to be at work until three on Sunday, I have absolutely no doubt that I'll be sluggish and weird all day long. Just as I was when we "fell back" some months ago--I mean, it's always nice to get that extra hour of sleep in the fall, but it seems to have the same effect with me when I lose an hour in the spring. Really, it usually takes two or three days before I'm feeling myself again.

But no matter. I like the time change. I mean, over the long term. I like it getting dark early in the winter, and I like super long days in the summer. Maybe it's just what I'm used to, but I dig it. I also like "springing forward" and "falling back" as yearly rituals, signifying the change from wet season to dry season. It's always a bit exciting to me.

Likewise, I don't understand the people who bitch about it. I mean, okay, some bitching about losing sleep is just fine and all, but I've been hearing people these last few years really bitching about DST, insisting that we do away with it because...well...they're usually reasons amounting to not much more than "it sucks." Sleep scientists may very well have some hard and fast arguments soon against changing our clocks twice yearly, but until then all the anti-DST people have is "it sucks." Not much of an argument if you ask me.

Anyway, be sure to set your clocks forward one hour if you haven't already.

Yea! It's spring!

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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NO, NO, NO. IT'S GOOD THAT PEOPLE
THINK COMIC BOOKS ARE TRASH

From Tapped, a liberal blogger bemoans a New Yorker review of The Watchmen characterizing comic fans as big nerdy geeks, courtesy of Eschaton:

I'm not going to argue with Lane over the quality of a film I haven't seen, but I really find it hard to understand why comic book fans are the subject of such persistent abuse. You'd think we clubbed baby seals for a living or perhaps sold sub-prime mortgages. The unbridled contempt for people who like comic books reaches something close to the feelings people have for parking cops and tax collectors.

And

Whatever Lane's opinions of Watchmen's source material, comic books are the closest thing Americans have to folktales, and their content is about as close as a reflection of American cultural identity, for good or for ill, as we have. You'd think that for that reason alone, the material and its consumers would be worth at least a minimum of respect.

More here.

Okay, this guy's right in that comics are indeed American folk tales, and their creators and readers are worthy of respect. But he misses the point. The New Yorker is an elitist magazine. I mean okay, they produce some good journalism--indeed, Sy Hersh, the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib story, consistently produces excellent in-depth articles, month after month. But the magazine's favored demographic, the readers they want to see their ads, are people who consider themselves to be a few notches above working class Americans, culturally speaking, and the New Yorker clearly plays to this vanity. That is, New Yorker writers are stuck-up elitist assholes who think we should all be attending the theater and the ballet rather than reading comics.

But isn't is so very American to thumb our noses at snobs? Isn't it wonderful when we drink beer instead of wine? Isn't it wonderful to watch football instead of polo? Eat french fries instead of fois gras? And it's not like we Americans want to somehow prove that lowbrow is better than highbrow; it's simply that this is what we love: fuck you for condemning that.

Comic books do indeed, upon occasion, rise to the level of great literature, but much much more often than not, comics are just fun to read. And when you do happen to stumble upon great comic literature, it's all the sweeter because you know that this is an experience you're sharing with only a relative few. Personally, I like it when snobs look down on comics. It makes me feel more American. And it makes me feel like I know better.

There's just no need to insist that the highbrow culture world accept comic books as being a legitimate art form. It ruins the fun. And just look what happened to jazz and theater once they achieved high art status. Everytime I hear some comic fan declaring comics to be great literature, I fear for the medium's future.

So, okay, this New Yorker reviewer is wrong and he's an asshole. But the best response isn't "respect us." The best response is "fuck you, I'm gonna read some comics, and I don't give a shit what you think." That's the American way.

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Top Republican's Groveling Apology to Rush Limbaugh Is a Media Disaster

From AlterNet:

The following evening, on CNN's D.L. Hughley show, Steele attempted to reassert control over the party. When Hughley referred to Limbaugh as "the de facto leader of the Republican Party," Steele shot back, "No, I'm the de facto leader of the Republican Party!" And he mocked Limbaugh as an "entertainer" whose behavior was "incendiary" and "ugly."

Almost as soon as the broadcast ended, a firestorm of criticism erupted on the right-wing blogosphere. "It's not easy watching a black guy stumble around in the dark, but really, I'm trying," wrote Dan Riehl, a marketing manager who hosts the popular conservative blog, RiehlWorldView.com, in posting widely circulated on the right.

While conservative bloggers and radio talkers piled on, Limbaugh lashed out at Steele with a condescending on-air rant, barking at the chairman "to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do." Finding himself under fire from Rush's army of self-proclaimed "Dittoheads," Steele immediately sued for peace. "I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele whimpered.

And

But given Limbaugh's well-documented history of racial controversy, and Steele's position as the Republican Party's first African American chairman, his apology is more significant than Gingrey's. Limbaugh has, for example, mocked Obama as a "Halfrican-American" who should "become white;" he has called for a "posthumous Medal of Honor" for the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Earl Ray, and told an African American caller, "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."

More here.

Given the way that racist language is so common among the GOP's core of true-believers, one wonders how the party is able to attract any African Americans at all--everyone's an individual, I suppose, and some of them are obviously deaf, dumb, and blind. At any rate, I'm totally loving this. Drug addict and prostitute user Rush Limbaugh is a cruel and inhuman racist pig, and that makes him the perfect leader for the Republican Party. No, seriously.

A few weeks back, after President Obama had made some sort of negative reference to Limbaugh in a speech, corporate news media pundits roundly criticized him for stooping to the level of a mere radio personality--the idea was that Presidents only make themselves look bad when they do such a thing. The talking heads were wrong as usual. Indeed, between Steele's televised attack on Limbaugh, and the RNC Chairman's later apology for it, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel pressed Obama's position on CBS's Face the Nation, branding Limbaugh as head of the GOP, asserting that if any party loyalist crosses the big fat idiot, he must necessarily apologize later. Sure enough, Steele was licking Limbaugh's nasty asshole within hours.

The point here, from the White House's point of view, is that right-wing psychos like Limbaugh can do nothing but hurt the Republicans at this point, forcing them to adhere to insane conservative positions while alienating pretty much everybody else. And everybody else is around some seventy percent of the country. Treating Limbaugh like he's much more than simply a talk show host is a win-win for President Obama. The more that people perceive Rush as the face of the GOP, the more that people will hate the Republicans.

And I just love it when people hate Republicans. I wonder how much more they'll self-destruct before they turn it around? My bet is that the bottom is far deeper than anyone imagines.

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Twitter

From Tom Tomorrow over at This Modern World:

This is what I genuinely don’t understand: Norah O’Donnell spends her life in front of cameras, broadcasting to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. Why in god’s name is it important to her to send out “tweets” to an additonal 1,509 voyeurs?

And why do any of those people care that at 3:04 p.m. on Wednesday she is “Heading upstairs to the studio.” Seriously — why in god’s name would anyone care what anyone is doing to that degree of minute specificity?

For awhile I thought it might be fun to start sending out tweets every few minutes, about my most banal activities. Brushed my teeth! Took a shit! Checked my email! Sending out a tweet! Except that seems to be pretty much what people are actually doing. Satire has to surpass reality, not simply reflect it.

More here.

Right. I'm afraid I just don't get what Twitter is about. I mean okay, obviously there's some kind of novelty appeal--I was doing Facebook for a while there back when I was at LSU, and the whole sense of meaningless chatter from dozens of cyberspace "friends" was kind of fun, I must admit, but I ultimately got tired of it and quit. But I can't get past the notion that this is something of a technological dead end, a fad without any real substance or use, something nobody will really give a shit about five years down the road. I could be wrong, of course. It's entirely possible that some braniac will eventually figure out some really cool use for the software that nobody has even imagined yet. Maybe an airliner will be trapped deep underwater in the Atlantic and Twitter is the only way they can communicate with Coast Guard rescuers. Or maybe it will be the means by which surgeons in Houston talk a nurse in the Antarctic through emergency brain surgery on Admiral Peary or somesuch. Or maybe Twitter will be the inspiration for a new generation of poets who only write really really short poems.

But really, it's probably just another meaningless fad. Like AOL was.

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FAT TUESDAY IN THE QUARTER, 2009
or
STALKING ST. ANNE

Well, it's been about a week, so I figure it's time I posted my Mardi Gras pics. As with last year, I had marvelous fun participating in the greatest show on Earth. Also, as with last year, Becky and I marched into the Quarter with the Society of Saint Anne. Unlike last year, however, I have less commentary here about the festivities. That is, last year was my first real Mardi Gras in New Orleans; it was virtually impossible for me to not see it all as an awe struck outsider, an observer. This year I tried to be more of a participant: I mean, don't ask me what that means exactly; part of it was trying to shut off my analytical interior dialogue and just go with the flow of it all. Getting drunk and maintaining my buzz all day helped out quite a bit, but like I said last time, Fat Tuesday in the Quarter is only passingly about drunkenness. Mostly, it's about being part of the mass and an individual at the same time, about being ready to join the performance at any moment, about appreciating the performances of others.

So like I said, less commentary this year, but I will make this observation. I really enjoy marching with the Saint Anne krewe. There's this whole sense of anticipation building as the parade's numbers swell with each block it passes on the way from Bywater through Marigny and into the Quarter. And what's particularly cool is leaving the parade after a while: you can't help but keep running into it again and again as you wander around. It's like, oh cool, there's Saint Anne again. I felt like we were stalking the neighborhood krewe. In a good way. Maybe the krewe was stalking me.

Who knows? It was Mardi Gras.

Anyway, check out the cool confetti.



This was posted outside a residence. Apparently, the owner changes it from time to time, but it's always supposed to be some sort of left-leaning political message. Deflating the pomposity of power is an entirely appropriate message for Fat Tuesday.



Saint Anne on the march.



I have no idea what this woman was throwing, but it was nice to get a shot of whatever it was while it flew through the air.



Yeah, that's a dead man in a coffin on wheels. And a ladybug.





The woman with the butterfly wings is Becky's pal Heather. She's actually in several of the pictures I took, taking pictures herself. The Sousaphones were an irresistible subject.



Bubbles floating around the Rue Royal.



The fundamentalist psychos trying to spoil everybody's fun at Jackson Square. Apparently, this is an annual event for them. The irony, of course, is that, rather than raining on the parade, they're absorbed by it, becoming part of the show. I imagine they're oblivious to that fact.

I wonder if some of them secretly enjoy Mardi Gras. Bet they do.



Marching bands everywhere.





Heather brought us to a little private party at a suite in a swanky French Quarter hotel. From its balcony, we once again encountered Saint Anne.

Here they come.



There they are.



And there they go.





Me and Becky. She was a fairy, part of a group of fairies which included Heather. I was dressed solo, and you wouldn't believe how many comments I got. "Make it so, Number One!" "Live long and Prosper." "Beam me up, Scotty!" One woman even called across the street to me, "I love you!"

God, I love Mardi Gras.



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Ailing G.O.P. Risks Losing a Generation

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

Americans identifying themselves as Democrats outnumber those who say they are Republicans by 10 percentage points, the largest gap in party identification in 24 years.

The gap has widened significantly since President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, when it was a mere 3 percentage points. But by the time Mr. Bush left office in January, less than a quarter of Americans approved of his performance.

These days, 38 percent of Americans say they are Democrats, 28 percent call themselves Republicans, and another 29 percent identify as independents, according to an average of national polls conducted last year by The New York Times and CBS News.

More here.

So it's once again becoming cool to be on the left. Nice. I've thought of myself as liberal for at least fifteen years, and in all that time, I've fully understood that I was going against the grain. I wonder how I'm going to deal with being part of the popular mass again. Actually, that's not quite true. Being a Democrat is not at all the same thing as being a leftist, and as regular Real Art readers well know, I've got plenty of ire for the Democrats. Granted, not nearly as much as I do for Republicans, but enough, I'm sure, to keep me blogging, at least, for years to come.

Still though, it's pretty clear that we currently are witnessing one of those political pendulum shifts America goes through every thirty or forty years. Conservatism is on the way out. I'm still not convinced that means liberalism is on the way in, but given the dark right-wing era of absurdity we've been enduring since the GOP took Congress back in '94, I'll take it.

For now, anyway.

What gives me hope is the conventional notion that people lock in their political attitudes when they're in their twenties: the biggest shift in political alignment, if I understand correctly, is among young Americans, who now favor the Democrats by an even larger percentage margin than the country as a whole. Unfortunately, that means my generation, which came of age during the Reagan years, and appears to be, by and large, rather conservative, is now something of a lost generation, slanted toward the right, even as the nation lurches left.

Whatever. At least I'm on the side of the up and coming. Maybe. I guess we'll see.

Of course, what troubles me is that in thirty years or so, if this is indeed one of those generational political realignments, conservatism will once again be looking good to young Americans. What can liberals do to avoid the stagnation and arrogance of the liberal political establishment of the 60s and 70s, which made it all too easy for Reagan, Gingrich, and other evil fools to capture Americans' imaginations?

If the left can't incorporate the concept of reinventing itself into its overall philosophy, the nightmare of the last eight years will happen again.

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