It's all right here, where he writes:

"I'm not sure I buy my colleague Josh's assessment about Washington being arrayed against Obama. Obviously there are institutional impediments to change of any kind, whether it's Reagan's or Obama's..."

That's a phony equivalence... There really aren't a lot of institutional impediments currently in place that would counteract Reagan style change.  We just went through 8 years of "tax cuts are the answer to everything," which is basically the Reagan economic doctrine (minus the Volcker strong dollar stuff that you can't credit to Reagan) so there really aren't institutional impediments to anything like that -- the media gives at least equal weight to tax cut arguments and the media routinely characterizes stimulus spending as pork.

Fact is... there are impediments to what Obama is trying to do and those impediments exist because, since the Clinton years, a lot of the major Washington D.C. institutions, including the media, continue to give credence to already discredited Republican ideas.

Also, lets stop comparing Obama to Reagan.  The two presidents had very different values and goals.

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

The Republican Rape of America

The Republican leadership and their corporate cronies have systematically brutalized and raped America. Now they're insisting that we give them a bonus instead of treating our wounds. Those are literally the facts, but why are so many Americans blind to the assault? In short, we've been brainwashed.

The Republican Party has demonstrated repeatedly that they are lousy at governance but there are none better when it comes to marketing their philosophy-and they should be, because they have but one philosophy-to divide and conquer. It would be inaccurate to call them racist, however, because they don't care any more about poor and middle class White people than they do minorities, but neither do they have any qualms about using racism and division to advance their interests.

Ironically, conservative Republicans have taken the Democratic Party's primary strength and used it against both the Democratic Party, and the American people as a whole. First they took the Democratic Party's penchant for being concerned with the plight of America and coin phrases like "bleeding heart liberals" and "tax and spend Democrats." Then they played on middle class frustration by tying civil rights, welfare, and crime into one neat bundle, and then attributed all of America's problems to the Democrat Party's tendency to be compassionate, or what they call, "bleeding heart liberals." The genius of that strategy was by engaging it, the Republican Party not only managed to demonize minorities as welfare cheats and criminals who only want to avoid work and prey on the middle class, but it also allowed them to tie all of those negative images to the liberal agenda. Then by using people like Rush Limbaugh and other Republican propagandists, they repeatedly hammered that message home until they convinced many poor and middle class White people to vote against their own best interests. After all, they didn't want to be aligned with "liberals," welfare cheats, and criminals-they're loyal and "hard-working" Americans. Thus, the Republican Party's entire agenda is about smoke, mirrors, and demonization in order to distract the American people. Take that ugly word "liberal" for example. The American Heritage Dictionary defines liberal as "Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry." What? An undereducated person wouldn't even recognize that definition. The way Rush Limbaugh spits it out you'd think liberal meant "one who stomps kittens and molests young children." On the other hand, The American Heritage Dictionary defines conservative as, "Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change." While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that definition-that is, unless you happen to be a woman, Black, gay, poor, or different in any way--the definition is just as significant in what it doesn't say as what it does. In the final phrase under "liberal" the definition says, "free of bigotry," while in the final phrase under conservative it says, "tending to oppose change." That distinction is not insignificant since "traditional views and values" render each of the groups indicated above subservient-and by definition, conservatives oppose any change in that regard. In addition, the phrase "free of bigotry" is conspicuously absent in the dictionary definition. Thus, Republican talking points not withstanding, even the dictionary recognizes their underlining agenda. But what Republicans are against is just as instructive as what they are for. During the recent bailout, Republicans responded to corporate fat-cats giving themselves huge bonuses with taxpayer bailout money with just a few whimpers and some scattered and perfunctory whining. But when President Obama proposed spending taxpayer money on schools, police and firemen, you could hear their wail across the land. What makes protecting our communities, and educating American children more wasteful than giving out huge bonuses, perks, and jets to corporate fat-cats? There are three answers to that question. First, when we spend money on the American people, it takes away from their piece of the pie. They'd rather take that money and give even lager windfalls to their cronies--the very same fat-cats that they bought the jets for. While they claim the fat-cats are going to use that money to create jobs, we just saw exactly what they're actually going to do with it by the way they handled the bailout money--they're going to use it to wine, dine, and enrich themselves. The second reason that every Republican member of the house, and all but three in the senate, voted against helping the American people is that they didn't want to risk undoing all the time and effort that they put into brainwashing us. It wasn't easy trying to teach the American people that thinking of themselves was selfish, morally repugnant, and a form of socialism. But you've got to hand it to the Republicans, when you consider the unrestrained greed of the corporate fat-cats that we just witnessed, it is truly unbelievable how they continue to keep Americans in the dark. Which brings us to the third reason-education. After addressing the first two issues, it shouldn't be hard to understand why Republicans are against funding education-their very survival depends on an undereducated electorate. It's not easy to get people to vote against their own interests, and it would be next to impossible if the people were properly educated. The survival of Republican Party is totally dependent on a non-thinking electorate who will have a knee-jerk reaction to the fallacy of the "isms." In spite of the fact that the only way that America can possibly survive is through a highly educated citizenry, the Republican Party simply cannot afford an educated electorate. How can they survive in an environment where you have citizens asking, "Now, how is giving these fat-cats my money going to get them to create jobs, if you don't leave me with enough money to purchase what they produce?" They simply cannot have that kind of independent thinking running rampant throughout the nation. They need a population that's so dumb that every time they holler "socialism" we'll hand over our piggy banks. They need to keep us so ignorant that they can convince us that a government job is not really a job, it's just meaningless work, while at the same time, blind to the fact that they've been feeding from the public troff for the past thirty years. Eric L. Wattree wattree.blogspot.com A moderate is one who embraces truth over ideology, and reason over conflict.

Story link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20090214_Shooter_had_death_wish__police_say.html

    I'd say God damn this city but it looks like the good citizens of Philadelphia have beat Him to it. When is the underclass of this city going to recognize that they represent? And I'm talking social, not racial, class here, because this country is drawn on economic lines. Yet shooter Rasheed represents Black America in the eyes of many the length and breadth of this county, he represents the city in the eyes of suburbanites and rural Americans, he represents the poor in the eyes of the world. This city - this country - will never take a step forward until we realize that while we are busy making political statements there are entire cultures we ignore or marginalize or avoid... to everyone's detriment. You want to talk about racism? The young dudes in the Inner City think every cop is corrupt, every white is racist. I don't exaggerate. I worked there, taught there, lived there. Now I have a white neighbor down the block who thinks every dark-skinned person is beyond reach, even vile. When are Black leaders going to go into the city and try to reach these brothers, instead of worried about unfairly being labeled an Uncle Tom? When are White leaders going to do the same, instead of being worried about the stigma of being unfairly maligned as a racist? Go and tell all these hotheads them to behave themselves, tell them to wake up and see the world not as a harmful place but teach instead teach them Humanity's dearest lesson?

 

That most of the harm and love that befalls us in this lifetime is of our own doing.

 

God damn political correctness. Go out into the world and make a difference. Treat people as people and take the time to reach someone beyond your sphere. And hug a cop!!

 

As detailed here.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the
House Financial Services Committee, said the
administration's program would probably
require changes to federal law. Some of those
are already working their way through
Congress. But Frank said he is looking to
pull them together into a single housing
package.

The legislation would include a provision
changing the bankruptcy law to allow judges
to modify the mortgages of distressed
homeowners, including by reducing the
principal of the loan to the property's
current market value, he said. This proposal
has already gained support from one House
committee but drawn fierce objections from
Republicans and the financial industry.
Though Obama supports this provision, he
declined to include it in the stimulus bill
approved yesterday, fearing the bankruptcy
measure would derail the overall legislation,
Democratic congressional sources said.

Another provision, Frank said, would provide
legal protection to lenders who reduce
interest rates or otherwise modify the terms
of troubled loans for homeowners. Some
previous foreclosure prevention efforts have
been hampered by the threat that investors
who own securities backed by the mortgages
would sue to block loan modifications,
according to the financial services industry.
ad_icon

The package could also clarify Treasury
Secretary Timothy F. Geithner's authority to
use funds from the financial bailout program,
which was set up to rescue the banking
industry, to provide incentives to lenders
that modify troubled loans. The bill could
also make clear that the Federal Housing
Administration has the authority to bar some
lenders from its programs. That move would be
aimed at predatory lenders.

This sounds like a good step in the right direction.  I can see
how the banks and investors would scream bloody murder,
though. But is their own fault. For buying into the real estate
con in the first place. Most of these houses were priced way
beyond their value and the people who actually made hay
were the real estate developers and speculators who took the
money and ran long ago. The owners got scammed and the
banks got scammed and the investors got scammed.

Hopefully these institutions will use a bit more discretion
when writing these loans in the future and the price of
housing will reset to something more in line with it's
actual worth.

C

LPACTV: Webcast Excerpt -- Bankruptcy Reorganization

Excerpt From February 11, 2009 Webcast.

Question to LaRouche from a member of President Obama's Economic Team.

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2009/02/13/lpactv-webcast-excerpt-bankruptcy-reorganization.html

LaRouchePAC Issues Updated Version of Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2009/02/05/larouchepac-issues-updated-version-homeowners-and-bank-prote.html

I've been thinking about who we are, species-wise, where we are coming from, and where we´re going to.  In the animal kingdom, I think intelligence is selected for in predators, less so in herbivores and scavengers, and not at all in photosynthesizers.  I think scavengers and herbivores intelligence would largely be directed toward escape and avoidance strategies with regard to their predators.  Sometime after the origin of cyanobacteria/blue-green algae I imagine a phagocytic cell mutated, and did well due to an abundant ready-made food source, and coincidentally helped thin the photosynthetic herd.  The presence of canines in human dentistry pretty well defines what side of that equation homo sapiens falls on.  Hunting prey as well as an opposable digit would seem to select for the technological advancement of a predatory species, whether it is defined as a twig dipped in an anthill by a chimp, or the developement of other ´tools´like spears, bow and arrow, and semi-automatic firearms.  So I think we´re coming from a predatory background, with some opportunistic gathering thrown in to the mix.

As our species´knowledge and intelligence increases so does our success in hunting, (and gathering).  This would likely correlate to larger and more densely distributed populations, which in turn puts more pressure on prey species.  So migration, seasonal and otherwise became part of the human condition.  About 13,000 years ago our planet underwent a cold snap.  An Ice age uncovered the Bering land bridge, which allowed easy access to North and South America by large numbers of us.  The availability of large populations of prey species all but guaranteed this migration.  An abundance of wooley mammoth, bison, etc. would have produced the Holicene equivalent of the California gold rush.  The prizes far exceeded the risks.  What are a few sabre-toothed tigers when compared to this bonanza of megafauna.  So... as things 'heated up´with the end of the ice age conditions became more lucrative for us, and less so for all that megafauna.  As our population and technology increased along with global temperatures and megafauna populations diminished or became extinct, we were able to implement more complex survival strategies, especially regarding agriculture.  This developement reflected a sea-change in the human paradigm.  We were able toproduce significantly more food than could be reliably hunted and gathered, thus allowing larger human populations to be supported while suffering fewer losses due to short term ecologic events such as drought.  Farming also pretty much ended nomadic/migratory lifestyles where climate supported it.  This post- Holicene warming period marked mass extinctions of other non-prey species along with a concommittant increase in our own population(s).  This pattern of extinction continues unabated to this day.  Whether these extinctions are due to man´s activities, global warming , or both is still being debated.  Our reliance on animal husbandry for for food exacerbates the issue of rising global temperature through the production of greenhouse gases.  It´s been estimated that farm animal production contributes more to the carbon load we pump into the atmosphere than the amount added through our use of diesel and internal combustion engines in transportation.
 

Read more »

Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidency in 2008 because he was a cheerleader for what Americans have wanted for a very long time, an end to political gridlock.  We embraced this young visionary leader who wanted to put an end to governance according to the counter-productive strategy of red and blue states competition. With this lame philosophy of red and blue states, absolutely nothing ever gets accomplished.  Well, nothing positive gets accomplished, but the divisiveness of red and blue states competition has become a profitable product line.

For some, an end to 51 to 49 percent politics just might not be good for business.  People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will find it more difficult to meet their projected profit margins since more people will choose to turn them off. Why do you think Rush is so upset these days?  People working together upsets the apple cart. But worrying about Limbaugh and Hannity pales in comparison to the havoc that will be perpetrated by the party out of power, the GOP.  They will use whatever gimmickry they deem necessary in their effort to return to power.

Almost to the point of arrogance, Republicans have not been shy about their desire for President Obama to fail.  Even though the country is burned out on long campaigns, and even though President Obama has been in office less than a month, the GOP 2012 quest for the presidency is in full gear.  Their desire to winin 2012, trumps the economy being in the tank, high unemployment, the War in Iraq, a chicken in every pot, it trumps everything. Is it for the good of the country, as in country first? What do you think? 

So President Obama shouldn't be terribly surprised when he cannot muster significant Republican support for legislation that might reverse the downward spiral the country is experiencing right now.  Nevertheless, it still boggles my mind to think that we have politicians like Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky fighting to keep the status quo and the misery manufactured by the party in power the prior eight years.  Well, Mr. McConnell, the majority of the United States including your neighboring state of North Carolina, voted for change even if most in your home state did not.  We also voted for President Obama to spearhead that change.  We did not vote for more of the same. 

President Obama deserves credit for trying to build bipartisan support.  It's a great commonsense approach and it would yield widespread benefits. However, often when major change occurs, dinosaurs tend to insist that it is just a fad and stubbornly try to stand in the way of progress.  They simply cannot or refuse to adjust to reality and a sizable percent of them, simply get left behind. I imagine that is what will happen to a lot of Republicans when they run for re-election in the mid-term.  They will simply get left behind, because the rest of us are moving on.

TPMDC says:

NYT: Obama Finds Out Bipartisanship Isn't So Easy
The New York Times reports that the Obama Administration has discovered in the stimulus debates just how difficult it will be to craft bipartisan legislation with the Republican opposition. David Axelrod said the White House has "learned some lessons from this," but is happy with the result, while former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta predicted that Republican support was "wishful thinking" that won't be coming to pass: "If you're going to do this at the moment of greatest need, at the height of his popularity, what sort of thing would get you to change?"

I find this whole soap opera stupidly wasteful.

The RECOVERY (not "stimulus") bill was already bipartisan.  It had tax cuts and spending, it offered bonehead moves to both sides of the aisle. So the first premise is just stupid, not even false.    And just how hard was it?  They crafted a bill, got enough support to pass it in very close shape to how it started, and now it's being spun as having been a tough row to hoe??  Maybe the media needs to learn that excess sensationalism is stupid.

The WH learning is a good thing, but portraying it as if they had an epiphany is stupid.  There is no reason to believe that anyone expected a walk in the park or rose petals. Furthermore, this bill is a huge departure whether for better or worse.  And it passed in short order.  It's stupid to think that opposition voices will not be raised, stupidly or smartly when huge deals are on the table.

Republican getting all knee-jerk partisan is nothing new, in fact it's been their MO for quite awhile.  But that doesn't make the bill not bipartisan, it makes the Repos stupid. 

Podesta is stupid to ask that.  It's precisely at this point that the opposition looks for unity in its ranks, stupidly or not. 

What confirms Repo stupidity are the MSM excerpts of their antics.  Offering up 100% tax cuts as an alternative is stupid.  It buys into the need for government involvement, a strong negative for most conservatives, and it's clear that tax cuts aren't as stimulative as some kinds of spending if you believe anything from the macro narrative.  Juggling numbers to fake other numbers is stupid when it's done stupidly as they did, and its unprincipled too.  So the Repos are disrespecting their conservative base while demonstrating patent dishonesty.  When you don't have the votes, it's time to speak truth to power, not lie and demand your own stupid version of power.

Maybe if they dig themselves in a bit deeper, they will become more bipartisan in their duties out of sheer necessity if not polity.  Maybe they're more childish than stupid, and will start showing a better kind of partisanship, and bipartisanship, now that they've had their tantrum and see how things are.








 

 

These three articles I accessed through Information Clearinghouse, http://informationclearinghouse.info/index.html , a sight I pony up five bucks a month for. I think they offer some really interesting juxtapositions in their reporting. A few teasers from the first:

"By Greg Miller

February 13, 2009 "LA Times" -- Reporting from Washington -- Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb."

"Obama's nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. "From all the information I've seen," Panetta said, "I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability."

"U.S. officials said that although no new evidence had surfaced to undercut the findings of the 2007 estimate, there was growing consensus that it provided a misleading picture and that the country was poised to reach crucial bomb-making milestones this year." [Emphasis added]

Cool, I really like that last one. Officials are publicly announcing that they don't need any new evidence to change the consensus of belief among the "experts". Also, remember the part about this year.

More:

"Obama's top intelligence official, Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, is expected to address mounting concerns over Iran's nuclear program in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee today.

The second article is:

US Intel Confirms Iran Not Developing Nukes
By Press TV

" The UN nuclear watchdog, which has carried out the highest number of inspections in its history on Iranian nuclear sites, has also found nothing to indicate that the program has diverted toward weaponization.

Blair also acknowledged that Tehran has made significant progress in its uranium enrichment program during the past two years.

"Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them," said the retired admiral.

He, however, did not elaborate on how his organization can assess that Tehran intends at a minimum level to keep open the option to develop nuclear weapons.

The US official added that the intelligence agency believes Iran is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon before 2013".

The third:Economic Crisis 'Top Threat to US'

By Al Jazeera

February 13, 2009 "Al Jazeera"

Towards the end,Dennis Blair in reference to the economic crisis says,

"It already has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure," Blair said.

He also cautioned that while US intelligence could not be certain that Iran intended to develop nuclear weapons, the nation was "keeping open the option" to develop them.

On the issue of North Korea, Blair said the country is unlikely to use its nuclear weapons unless it feels its survival is at stake.

Oh, yea, Information Clearinghouse's title for the first article was:

Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran?

Photo by Belize.com

Over the last several years as more people, organizations and governments began to take the prospect of global warming and human influenced climate change more seriously there has arisen a kind of 60 cycle background hum over the potential dangers of social unrest, disease, famine and mass movements of populations resulting from such change.

A few days ago while randomly browsing on the web I read an article at the Kansas City Star that sent a quick chill through my bloodstream: "Intelligence director: Worldwide economic crisis top U.S. security threat.

Read more »

If you wanted to express the full meaning of the present situation in tight lipped, grim fashion, this might be it. The new director of America's national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, expressed concern about long-term harm to America's reputation. The crisis that began in American markets has already "increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy"

Since the end of the Second World War the United States has been the guarantor of the world's market economy, which since the fall of the Soviet Union is the only "world economy". Almost all, if not all, of the world's raw materials are priced in dollars which only the United States can print. This has meant, roughly, that the United States could go into the world's "supermarket" and pay with IOUs, redeemable with... more IOUs.

Read more »

Read more »

I know the economic pundits are all about continuing doom and gloom even with the new stimulus plan.  And I know Barack should have started higher at say $1.2 trillion and all that Krugman stuff.

But then I read about the success of the New Deal and how the GDP of the country literally turned on a dime in March of 1993.  Wiki has a nice chart that shows that except for a little blip in 1937 when FDR pulled back, it continued to grow right into WWII  [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp20-40.jpg).

This morning I read this quote from the Washington Post, and it makes me go hmmm??:

"The New Deal of the 1930s equaled no more than 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. The new legislation represents over 5 percent and is probably no more than an opening bid -- Obama and his congressional allies will next turn to the foreclosure crisis, the reform of financial markets and an overhaul of federal budget practices."

Do you think that maybe somebody (i.e. POTUS) knew what they were doing all along?

I came across this at The Daily Beast yesterday:

Hillary Transue, 17, of Wilkes-Barre, PA, knew something was wrong when she was sentenced to three months in juvenile detention for making fun of her assistant principal on MySpace in 2007. "I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare," Transue said. Now federal prosecutors say that Transue's Kafkaesque ordeal was part of a vast kickback scheme between two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, and two privately run youth detention centers, who paid off the courts in order to secure lucrative subsidies for taking in more teens. The accused judges pleaded guilty yesterday and will get a taste of their own medicine with 87 months in prison. Now officials are trying to figure out what to do with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who were sentenced by Ciavarella from 2003 on, when the scam began, some of whom are still in detention centers.

Folks (as lush rimjob always says) this is out sourcing.  You see government is so over beauracratised (Fox, WSJ, Nazi International, and other right wing pubs) that we need the cut all the crap oomph of private industry to 'grease the wheels' and get things working. 

So here we have the government out sourcing mandatory housing for children to the grand private sphere and boy is this not a wonderful example of greasing the wheels. And greasing the hands of judges so little girls can receive mandatory housing for throwing oral excrement on vice principals. 

Yesterday, I watched Colbert or Stewart (a rerun and I forget which) and a guest noted that twenty years ago, there would be a civilian employee of a contractor for every ten soldiers.
Today there are 140,000 soldiers in Iraq and 170,000 civilian (and I use that word judiciously) employees of contractors in Iraq.

I noted in a previous blog that there is mandatory housing for adults that have been found guilty of more grevious crimes than children throwing oral excrement provided by private contractors in this country. 

Do you know why reps are all for out sourcing.  Their argument really boils down to this.  Government must take responsibility for the worker.  Government must provide standards for hiring and firing.  Standards for pay grades. Standards for pensions. Standards for health care.  Those at the upper eschelon of that pay grade system do not make more money in a day than the lowest worker makes in a year. Government does not abuse the worker.

We are in the process of creating the true fascist society, folks.  The partnership between the government and powerful private corporations where all rights and power of the people are placed in the hands of powerful corporate management leaving nothing for the citizen.

Do you know how much money we have thrown away, given away to management during this illegal war? Hundreds of billions of dollars.  In Iraq the greedy fascists employ Indians, Indonesians, Africans....for pennies on the dollar and then pocket the real fruits of American Taxpayer monies.

This really bothers me and it should bother all of us.

Andrew Sullivan, whom I'm liking more and more each day, has some interesting speculation about the Obama Bank Bailout 3.0 which casts the whole thing in a whole new light for me.

There are two lines of speculation about the direction the Obama team will go. One, the most likely, is the 'bad bank' model in which the government buys up the toxic assets and helps get the banks off their feet; the other is nationalization, in which the government applies a "stress test" on the largest most troubled banks, and for those that fail, declares them essentially insolvent, wiping out the shareholders and taking them over directly (aka the Swedish model).

Some feel the secret plan is to pursue the Swedish model covertly, since the country is not ideologically ready for it and the GOP will make tons of political hay over it. But most feel that Geithner won the debate with more politically populist elements in the Administration such as Emanuel and Axelrod ie., the Bad Bank model won. Hence, the Administration is likely to have to seek trillions more from Congress to buy up those assets and face the politically troubling question of what price to pay. When asked directly, Obama has ruled out nationalization, although not in a way that inspires confidence that he understands what nationalization would entail. More and more economists are coming forward with the stated realization that Nationalization is probably the way we have to go.

Observers of Geithner's weak performance this week commented that markets didn't like the vagueness and ambiguity of the plan, so they went down sharply on the day he spoke. But what if we look at this another way? What if the market's direction provides an indication by buyers and sellers of the way in which the Administration is likely to go. If indeed bank shareholders are worried that they are going to have a bad year, and if indeed there are a number of large banks that are essentially insolvent, then bank stocks' downward direction is not a statement that the Administration is being vague, but an expression of the likelihood that the Administration will eventually need to adopt the Nationalization strategy and wipe their value out. If I were an owner of bank stocks, I'd be really, really nervous right now.

It's in the Administration's strategic interest to keep the question open for as long as they can, so they can hedge their policy bets. But it's in the bank shareholder's interests for Obama to commit to the 'bad bank' model as quickly as possible. Here's hoping he chooses continued ambiguity and options over assuaging the shareholders.

Maybe ten was a nice even number; five on one side, five on the other.   Maybe there was an emblazoning smudge and God was a real neat freak.  

Wall Street execs who have presided over this mess are complaining that the congressioal limits on compensation will cause them to lose high performing personnel.

I've no idea how Wall Street measures performance but a quick look around suggests to me that Wall Street performance has been, at the very least, sub par.

Wall Street still doesn't get it.

They have failed miserably.

The idea that they are entitled to a reward for this level of performance is incomprehensible.

I hope Obama is paying attention.

Losing trillions of dollars isn't something that merits a reward.

 

I'd like to see this book get as widespread attention as possible. 

It is an engagingly reported look at working conditions in the south China industrial factories, which appears to be balanced and should help to ground discussion about our and other countries' policies towards China on a better factual foundation.  The book is subtitled "The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage".  Harney, who freelances now, was the Financial Times' south China correspondent between 2003 and 2006 and speaks Mandarin Chinese.

I'll share a few things I learned from it below.  I'd be most interested if denizens have come across contrary information and points of view that seem credible.   

But before doing that, I'd like to recommend that those of you who are interested in what is going on in China should definitely check out recent blog posts from our fellow veteran cafe denizen, Tom Wright, at his <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/tom_wright/">blog page</a>  Tom has been traveling about China of late (and may still be there, not sure about that) and has, as he typically does, lots of interesting observations.

A few things I learned from Harney's book:

*the labor laws on China's books passed by its central government are far more substantial than I would have thought. The problem is that law enforcement efforts, which are localized, are paltry--and everyone knows it.

*There is growing consciousness and unhappiness among Chinese workers dissatisfied with their working conditions and lack of say on workplace issues, which a number of NGOs in Hong Kong have built on to stimulate interest in various forms of worker representation.

*the central government, at least in the abstract (minus real resources to enforce the laws they enact they don't appear to be that serious about it, however--it may be more for international show), appears interested in improving working conditions and workers' opportunities for some say in what goes on in the workplaces. A fundamental tension is that local governments depend for their revenues on development-maximizing policies, which runs headlong into enforcing the labor and environmental laws on the books because doing the latter worsen the (in this case, primarily foreign) investment climate in particular. Sound familiar? Non-unionized, low wage US states pursued this race to the bottom strategy only to see the jobs go to Mexico and then East Asia.

*India, Pakistan, and Vietnam are among the countries with lower wages than China which multinationals (mostly, for now) talk about moving to if the Chinese "weaken the investment climate" (i.e., address labor and environmental problems with laws and policies that are actually enforced). China retains some competitive advantages vis a vis these countries--including clustering of supply chains. Vietnam has independent labor unions which reduce its attractiveness to multinationals contemplating jumping off the China ship.

*Harney believes that when the Chinese government sets its mind to an objective, it is usually pretty successful at achieving it. There is considerable unrest--expressed in the form of large numbers of public protests--in the country over major, major environmental problems, air quality and contamination of drinking water supplies in particular, that are destroying the health and lives of growing numbers of Chinese citizens. This is the most immediate source of pressure on the government re environmental problems, and it appears to be growing.

*The one-child family policy adopted in the late 1970s is just now starting to contribute to labor shortages which could put workers in a somewhat more favorable position to bring about positive workplace change. The second generation of migrant workers shows signs of the sorts of cultural changes seen in Japan and other once-poor countries which experienced dramatic economic growth--rising and more demanding expectations in terms of what they want out of their lives in particular.

 

 

It's been so long since we had a President with an appreciation of what this country---this nation---means, and how important our history is to what we are today, that every time he speaks seems to be an astounding event. The comparison of our new President's speeches to the movie bromides and fractured histories of Ronald Reagan are just further evidence of the inability of so many (at least so many of those who appear on cable tv) to be able to tell the difference between someone playing the part of a leader and an actual one.

Read more »

Second only to Citigroups $45 billion, AIG pulled down $40 billion from a special TARP category for "Systemically Significant Failing Institutions". AIG did most of their CDS writing in London through their Financial Products subsidiary. Did all the $40 billion go off-shore?

State Street and BNY-Mellon got $2 billion and $3 billion respectively.

Other notable recipients (at least $2 billion) not at last weeks hearings were:

$3.50 B SunTrust

$3.13 B BB&T

$2.25 B Comerica

$3.50 B Regions

$3.55 B Capital One

$2.50 B KeyCorp

$6.60 B US Bancorp

$7.58 B PNC

$3.41 B Fifth Third

$2.33 B CIT Group

$5.00 B GMAC

$10.40 B GM

$4.00 B Chrysler Holding

For the whole list, right down to the $1,549,000 doled out to the Saigon National Bank of Westminster, CA, see http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/eesa/docs/Fourth-Tranche-Report-Appendix.pdf

There are about 215 TARP recipients total. 

From the NYT this morning;
"Top economic advisers to President Obama adamantly opposed the pay restrictions, according to Congressional officials, warning lawmakers behind closed doors that they went too far and would cause a brain drain in the financial industry during an acute crisis."

BRAIN DRAIN!?!$!?$???!!!!

Those same brains drained our economy, why should we want them involved at all, let alone with bonuses for failure?

First, a simple observation.  If you want to fix the broken system, the best way to do that is to replace the head, not the body or the tail. If ever there was justification for a complete purging brain drain, it is in this situation. The more these greedy, landlocked brains can be drained, the better the chance that new ideas and a new spirit of community development, rather than personal wealth, will take hold and heal our markets.


Second, a comment to the people in Obama's administration who are beholden to these greedy execs and their lackeys;  reconsider those loyalties ASAP or you will embarrass your boss.

Even the mainstream media admits that The Public is PO'd to the point of no return, and your continued advice to the President to coddle these lousy managers makes many of us who voted for him and trust in him begin to question his judgment in choosing people like you (beholden to the execs) to positions of authority where you can protect your benefactors.

WE are your benefactors, via the instrument of democracy, and your tunnel vision and profane loyalties do you and President Obama very little good, considering the animosity it might inspire in The Public.

Stop coddling, or even protecting these creeps, you owe the American People much more, in terms beyond dollar figures, than the money you owe these monopolists. Many of these same "brains" should be in jail, not rolling inn easy tax-payer genreated failure bonuses.

John Kennedy campaigned in 1960on a wrong idea that we faced a "missile gap" with USSR - when it proved to be false, as President, he quickly dropped the idea, something Bush would never do with his cockamamie campaign idea of "missile defense."  Not before 9/11 when his attention was needed on terrorism, nor even after 9/11 when we sorely needed Russia's help.   Still, Bush's trademark pigheadedness fails to explain his Administration's eyepopping delusions that ex-USSR Republics of Georgia and even more bizarrely, Ukraine, needed to be in NATO.   Every Russophone knows that the Russian nation-state was born in Kiev - to insert further bellicosity into that 1200-year old relationship hits Moscow right at the core.  And more so, when the promoter is a prior sworn enemy now posing as a friend.

 

Bush's last summit with Russia's "former" (ha-ha) President Putin was held in Russia's Sochi resort, where the Russian leadership's traditional "dacha" had to be humiliatingly relocated from Imperial Russia's Crimea. (Crimea was clumsily attached to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954 but its citizens don't know Ukrainian and never did, and no one understands why Khrushchev even did this; anyhow, it's part of Ukraine at present.).   As Bush looked out from Sochi over the Black Sea from Putin's deck chairs in, its Brackish waters washed its six littoral states of Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, and Turkey.  Until the 1990s, all but Turkey were either part of USSR or among its closest military allies.  Except for Russia, by the April 2008 summit, the only remaining non-NATO members were Ukraine and Georgia both of whom have been in Russia's orbit for many centuries.  All that's tough enough for Putin to swallow, but Bush, the relentless antagonist much wanted them aligned against him as well.  While the American press gauzily depicted the summit as a nostalgic reflection by two old war horses, the exiting Bush's failures have nothing to do with the vital, dynamic Putin, who was so livid over Bush's pressing for Georgia to joint NATO, with two days to go he threatened not to show at all.  What if a bilateral summit is held, and the host doesn't attend?   How was the supine American press going to explain that one, an occasional just too sentimental for the old war horses to bear, maybe?

 

Don't we have enough trouble with two ruinous wars?  Well, not enough to keep Bush from refighting the Cold War, which we had already won by 1991.  Thank heaven above we now have leaders who are so dismayed with these disastrous policies, that nothing short of pushing the reset button is what they rightly pursue.  Here's a Valentine's gift from Obama to us all about scrapping that crazed, provocative missile defense:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/13/AR2009021303179.html   And here's hoping it works out!  

 

Only Bush could concoct a military misadventure even crazier than refighting the Cold War, which indeed, apart from the insanity of Iraq and the quagmire of Afghanistan, is another hideous mess he has left us with.

As I have noted a number of times (see links at end of article), the economic crisis is a global crisis. We are in a world of a global economic system that has been allowed to emerge with virtually no oversight or control. It is a system that has been structured to benefit richer nations and the corporations to which they are married. As nations pour trillions of dollars into the maw of the crisis, there is little (if any) improvement in the situation. This is because national strategies are analogous to trying to haul water to a fire in a bucket that is full of holes. The money poured in simply "leaks out" to the global financial "market." Yet, there is no plan (that I have seen) of a coordinated international strategy to stop the "leaks" and bring the global financial market to heel.

Read more »

The Mystery Continues; Episode III

The Feast of St. Valentine

Well why are we meeting in the French Count's room, inquired Iseult.

Because I can no longer rent the anteroom, or the ante anteroom for that matter. It is getting so one cannot rely on regular graft anymore. Answered Tristan. You are so lovely tonight and I am not worthy of thy beauty and thy beautious... er  manners. I am a peasant in awe of true blue blood. I am nothing to your everything.

Oh, Tristan, how you do go on. Tittle, tittle, tittle.

God I hate it when she does that, Tristan thought.  But her soft skin and beautiful aromas and her.....Tristan lunged for her with an ache inside hoping to express his ardor.

Now you are scaring me. Iseult shrieked.

Shhhhhhh. Keep it down Tittles. Tristan had a love name for his pet. We do not wish to be found out!!!

Tristan, there is no way I am going to wed a four foot monster who thinks that all peasants are revolting.  Every time I am forced to be with him, he tries to look up my gown. Then he justifies this impious behavior by saying that he is just checking for my chastity belt.

Speaking of chastity, I brought you this fine gift for the Feast of St. Valentines.

Oooooooh, Tristy-Iseult's pet name for her love was Trusty Tristy-you shouldn't have. She quickly unwrapped the gift that had been covered in the finest silk kerchief from the silk road.
Vwella, there was a silver toad.  A beautiful silver toad on the back portion of a gold toad.

Teehee, teehee, tittle tittle.  Ooooooh. What pray tell are the amphibians engaged in here.

The same thing we are about to  engage in anon, said Trusty Tristy with his pantaloons down to his ankles.

Ooooooooh. Tittle, tittle, tittle.

Approximately ten minutes later, as Trusty Tristy's smile began to fade into a short nap, there was a sound coming from down the hall.

Stay here my love, methinks something is up!!!!

Tristan ran down the hall and there in William of Riley's room was another dead body.  Trusty Tristy..er..Tristan ran back down the hall.  Something is afoot here Tittles, you must go back to the Lady's Quarters.  There has been a killing, a murder down the hall.  Quick, I must get the authorities and I do not wish to besmirch your honor.

Oh Tristy, Trusty Tristy, I love it when thou besmirches....

Tittles, obey me.

Tittles...er Iseult immediately stood to attention and, gathering her wraps and her toadies, proceeded the other way down to the hall to her quarters.  God I get so hot when he issues orders.

Running the other way, Tristan quickly grabbed a page and sent him to Bedivere and prepared to wait in Riley's room.  (It always seemed like pages were available at all times in these castles. Tristan himself escaped being a page due to the fact that his childhood was spent mainly in Ireland where they like ale and girls more than pages.)

As he sat on the bed next to the body, William of Riley came to his room.

WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT.  William thought very highly of himself at all times and always feigned haughtiness in capital letters. What is a Welshman doing in my diggs?

Oh lighten up Lothian. No wonder they call you Lothians. Cannot you see that bad deeds have been accomplished here, in your room?  And while we are at it, where have you been and how long have you been away from this room and who used to reside in the corpse that is now cold and lifeless and on your floor?

Just then Sir Rathbone appeared with Watson and Sir Bedivere.

You might wish to answer the questions put before you by the Welshman. Sir Rathbone said whilst pointing the accusatory finger at Riley.

Well, I never. See. No fair and balanced here. Not in these parts. This is just another example of politics, vicious politics.  Hey, lets hang a Lothian for this.  We can wrap up our investigation and put on a show.

Phew. What a stink I smelleth here.  Justice in Camelot.  Camelotians are all liars.  Except for Sir Lieberman, I never hear one truth coming from their mouths.

Stop, said Bedivere, and I mean right now.  Sir Tristan is a Welshman. Sir Rathbone and his chief servant, Watson are from Dover.  There is no reason for you not to act civilly and answer our questions or you shall be held for obstructing justice.

Sure, sure. That is how you stole the election woe so many years ago.  Sword in the stone? Who is kidding whom?  Everyone knows that the only stone involved in that selection was gold in color and promised to those who backed the Camelotian. The only place where the truth is recited is on the old Fox Road to the Lothian Enclave. And you know it.

We would have cut taxes, for everyone.  (Based upon what they pay in of course) And there would have been a trickle down effect so that the peasants living down stream would still get their water, just a little dirtier.  And everyone knows that the peasantry live in filth and so they are used to filthy water.  Just like when  w's mother made clear in New Orleans.

Snerf, who had just arrived turned to Macaca and asked: What is a new Orleans.  Isn't the only one in France.  They are not moving to my neighborhood are they?  Macaca shrugged. Geez these humans are obtuse, the hominid thought. And what is a w?

But would the Camelotians listen to reason, Nooooooooooo. Of course not, because they are all liberal vampires who  prefer sex without Luffas and think that all the aristocracy should be bodily turned upside down to find extra tax monies.  I tell you, if the taxes get any higher, well, well, I am just not going to come to work anymore.  I mean, I mean, it just will not be worth it anymore.....

Sir Bedivere had had enough. Guards. Guards. Beau Manes and a fellow guard appeared in the doorway.  Take this Lothian to the dungeon at once and make sure he hits his big fat head on the doorway as you take him out.

Sir Rathbone turned to Sir Bedivere after Riley was gone and there was time to cool off.   Methinks Sir Bedivere that this Riley, however distasteful in voice, manner and guise did not perform this offal deed. Methinks a deed like this is usually done by one brave of heart, however evil that heart may beith. Riley has no real heart.  If you booed at the right time a yellow scoundrel like Riley would be under the bed within a second and it would not matter how small the space was under such a bed.

With that Sir Bedivere began to laugh and laugh and roar with laughter as did Tristy er.. Tristan and Snerf and Watson.  (Sir Rathbone rarely laughed do to his problem with the pipe, so to speak)

I know, I know.  He did not do it.  And he could not have done it. But I had all these witnesses here and they were mostly visitors to Camelot and know one, and I mean no one, questions the sword in the stone.  Ever!!!!  Then Bedivere burst into even greater laughter.

All right. Let us examine th body.  Does anyone here recognize the poor lost soul?

Snerf looked and immediately recognize the corpse as that of Sir Goth, late friend of Sir Lagamor and enemy of King Lot and all Lothians.  Sir Goth lost his entire family in a raid by Lot's troops a year or so before Badon. Goth had been sent with Fathead Dobbs to the SE to pursue all the Angles and had returned due to a wound in his thigh.

Good Grace said Rathbone as he approached the body.  He noticed that Goth was on his back and a look of horror covered his face.  Just under his chin was a small dart.  The kind the Picts used up north. They had blow guns of a sort. Rathbone had been familiar with this device because in the old days he had served in a Roman Guard just south of Hadrians Wall and he knew the brutality of these sub men. Screaming and shrieking like Banshees. No culture.  Really fine whiskey, but no culture and they wore all those offal tattoos and they smelled funny.

This case was becoming darker and darker and it is not even the narrator's fault. Rathbone explained the situation to the principals and then stopped.  Tristan, what were you doing that you happened by when you did?

I was down the hall in the Frenchman's room, er...lingering.

Oh.  Sir Rathbone was fully aware of what lingering as a code meant, having been in the Roman Guard and having to bunk with the Greeks.  But he was sure Tristan liked girls.

Oh, forgive me Tristan but I had to ask.  Did you notice anything when you first came in?

There was a purple coat over there. I ran out to...er..grab a page to send for Sir Bedivere and when I came back it was gone.

Page. What page? Bedivere inquired.

But is that not how you ended up here?  Did not a page come and fetch you? asked Tristan.
Just then it occurred to Tristan that he had been had.  

That was an imposter.  I thought him a page because of his dress and his height but in point of fact he had too deep a voice....he was a dwarf.  Oh dear Jesus, my Lord and Savior.  

All at once they knelt and performed the Sign of the Cross.  Well Snerf had to be coaxed a little by Watson, but just the same.

Now, think carefully, hath anyone of you seen a dwarf at the Castle Camelot?  During the last few days.

The troupe.  The troupe has at least two dwarves. (I figure if you have one wharf, and two warves, you might as well have two dwarves.

Figuring that it was better to have a dwarf in the hand than two in the bush, let us seek this 'troupe'.  Where are they staying.

Tristan who was the entertainer of his day, so much so that some referred to him as Frank, spoke up.  The troupe comes twice a year and entertains tonight for the celebration of the Feast of St. Valentines Day.  Come, I will take you to them.

They moved on down the spiral staircase at the end of the hall to the floor just one story higher than the dungeon.  This was where the entertainers stayed.  Many desks and mirrors to aid in applying make-up.  Racks for hanging costumes.  And pictures of semi naked knights. A lot of free thinkers so to speak in these troupes.

Tristan pointed to the corner chest.  A big oaken chest with a greenish hue to it.  Upon closer examination, Snerf noticed the slime.  Just like the kind he had to clean up in the rafter room. Always the peasants that do the clean up around here. Slimy, ugly dirty work. And here I am, the top of the tops as far as peasantry and I will bet my left foot that I will be cleaning this room up as well before it is all over.

Sir Rathbone put his gloves on and gently lifted the unlocked lid.  Sure enough, there was another green slimy creature lurking inside the chest. Sir Bedivere was aghast and actually shrieked.  He had not even shrieked at Badon.  But this was disgusting and frightening at the same time.

At first they all stepped back, but Tristan took heart and came closer but with his sword drawn. The Slime in the chest was still. Not wishing to dirty his sword which had magical qualities, much like his other sword, he grabbed a prop hanging over the chest and prodded the substance.

Nothing. No reaction from the jello like substance.

SIX BELLS SIX BELLS SIX BELLS

That is Greenwich time is it not? Inquired Sir Rathbone.  

Sure, Govner. Announced Snerf, because he wanted to sound knowledgeable and he liked saying Govner.

Tristan noted that the troupe should be back from practice any minute.  Sir Bedivere assigned posts inside and outside the dressing room.

The troupe began trooping in. Satchel was the leader and as he entered he noticed Tristan. What Ho Tristan.  What is happening?

Oh we just have a few questions here for ya Satchel. There have been some irregularities today.

For instance is anyone missing from your ensemble today?

Oh, Geez, I ah do not think so. No everyone showed up for rehearsal.

Did all the little people show, Satchel?

Yeah, all three showed up.  Larry, Mo and Curly.  They did their triage on time and in form.
Here, here they are now!!!

Three dwarves came through the door. The one named Larry took one look at Tristan and ran away.  Away that is into the arms of Beau Manes.  Oh, oh.

Sir Rathbone, called Tristan, this is the little person that I thought was a page this afternoon.

Very well done Tristan.  Larry is it?

The dwarf nodded.

You want to share anything with us.

I was paid to do it by Sir Largo.

Do what, exactly Larry?

I was to sneak upstairs on the level with Sir Largo's quarters and wait outside at two bells. I was to dress as a page.  I was then to tell whoever I saw after that that I had seen William of Riley coming out of the room.  When I saw Sir Tristan, I freaked out and I was tongue tied.  When he gave me instructions to look for Sir Bedivere I merely nodded and ran away.

Did you see anyone else up there before you met up with Sir Tristan or afterwards?

No.

Come here, Sir Rathbone led the little person to the chest of the green slime.  Whose chest is this?

This chest right here?

We have been at this for sometime now Larry.  Do not play games with us.  We are not engaged in dice.  And I have heard of cases where little people go down into the dungeon and are never heard from again.

Ok, ok. Give me a second so that I may catch my breath.  Larry takes a deep breath.  Sir Largo brought this down around noon today.  Just after the troupe left for rehearsals.  I pretended to have forgotten something and came back to let him in. Then he took my key and told me to scram.

Have you seen Sir Largo since noon?

No, I have not.  I was to meet him following the show tonight.

Larry, you are going to go ahead with the show. Do you understand?

Yes, Govner.

Satchel, do you understand you are to go ahead with the show as if nothing happened?

What happened? Asked Satchel

Exactly finished Sir Rathbone.

The investigatory team proceeded to the Room of the Roundish Table to discuss the plan for that night.

Mainly, it lies there. a pile of asphalt showing its age. It runs from Broadway to South Street--a skinny little thing, hardly worth calling a thoroughfare. It has a church at one end, sort of--but it can't really claim it, the address is Broadway. It suffers the indignities of trash, dog poop, and other detritus, not to mention punctures by stiletto heels,

If it could think, it would probably be a pretty mournful set of thoughts, longing for the days when it marked the northern boundary of the city and could look at cows, rather than bulls or bears. But that's the point. Wall Street doesn't think. Wall Street doesn't react. Wall Street doesn't believe. Wall Street doesn't approve, or disapprove, and it doesn't panic. It just lies there, a skinny little ribbon of asphalt, and short, to boot.

Just look at it:

View Larger Map

I have to move on lest someone think a brain injury has made it impossible to understand metaphors. I use them myself, sparingly. My point is that every time the media speaks of Wall Street doing something, the act becomes depersonalized and the metaphor becomes ground cover for the living, breathing, women and men who actually do the things ascribed to Wall Street. Wall Street didn't invent bizarre financial instruments--some person did. Wall Street did not respond negatively to Obama's revisions of TARP...some people did, a quantifiable number, and not a huge number at that. The number of shares traded on any given day is huge, but quantifiable, the number of trades is smaller, but still rather large, I would gather. The number of significant trades--large bundles of shares, not a pocketful, must be smaller yet, and at the top of this pyramid, the number of managers making those trades and making those trades on their own authority must be smaller yet.

I don't know if it is possible to know who those wheeler-dealers are, I suspect not, except when they get indicted for something. I sometimes wish it was, and those calling for transparency in Government would call for equal transparency in finance. I'm not particularly interested in punishing them for dumb moves, except perhaps on my really cranky days. But I think the dumb move makers should be as visible to the public as the pro baseball player who strikes out in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, on a sucker pitch a sand lot tyro wouldn't have gone for in a million years.

I have to go, the Society for the Protection of Unjustly Maligned Asphalt meets in ten minutes.

Sri Lanka is making a lot of international news lately, but the gravity of the situation is not being conveyed - not even close - primarily due to the Sri Lankan government's propaganda and brutal censorship of the media.

I'm an American who has been working in the country for the past two years. Within the last six weeks, I've watched Sri Lanka's 25-year ethnic conflict become a full-scale genocide against the Tamil population (the primary minority group in the country). Some of the more obvious indications include:

1.     The government is in the process of putting approx. 300,000 Tamil civilians into military-run camps, which are, for all intents and purposes, Holocaust-style concentration camps: forced labor, lack of basic necessities and sanitation, indiscriminate killings and generally dire conditions.

2.     A few weeks ago, the military began systematically raping the women being held in these camps.

3.    In mid-January, the Sri Lankan military created a "safe zone" for Tamil civilians who were still in the war zone so that they would not be "caught in the crossfire". Once the civilians moved into the area, the military started bombing it, even hitting a hospital multiple times.

4.    The government instituted a mandatory registration last month whereby all Sri Lankan citizens are legally required to provide the government with such details as their name, ethnicity and home address.

At this point, it is fairly evident that the only way that the genocide will end is through international intervention. The international community, however, while showing growing concern about the situation and urging an end to the violence, is generally under the impression that Tamil civilians are merely being caught in the crossfire, not deliberately slaughtered. Unless it becomes clear to the rest of the world that the Sri Lankan government is intentionally trying to wipe out the Tamil population, it is unlikely that the international community will take any sort of meaningful action.

This post is an attempt to help get information about the genocide beyond the borders of Sri Lanka, if even in a very small way. Here are some ways you can help out as well:

·       Share this post friends. 

·       Contact Obama about these abuses and ask him to discontinue all aid to the Sri Lankan government, impose economic sanctions and appoint an official to coordinate a US response to the genocide.

·       Contact the State Department and ask them to urge Obama to do all of the above. Secretary Clinton has already demonstrated her interest in the situation by calling for a ceasefire.

·       Contact the the US Mission to the United Nations, and ask them to work with the Security Council to place economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Sri Lanka.

·       Contact your Congressperson and urge her or him to take immediate action to help end the genocide in Sri Lanka.

·       Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers along the same lines. You can find contact info for your local media here.

·       Reach out to community organizations to raise awareness about the situation and ask members to do any or all of the things on this list.

In the interest of not making this post ridiculously long, I've given a rather simple summary of an obviously very complex situation, but I'd be happy to provide additional information upon request.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Friday, the 13th is President Obama's lucky day.  The so-called "stimulus package" was voted out of the Senate late this evening with the minimum of 60 votes, three of whom were rebellious Republicans. It was lucky to pass. Democrats prevailed in the House of Representatives around noon with no Republican votes at all. Luckily the Democrats have a good sized majority in the House. President Obama is not having very good luck with the party of the Loyal Opposition. On this rocky road with this issue, bipartisanship is dead. It was, and probably still is, a lovely fantasy of President Obama's.

Actually it was probably never a viable option for governing in these times. The economy is too scary to Republicans. At some deep level they privately realize it went south on their watch. They have nothing new to offer to governance. Too many Republicans helped redistribute the nation's wealth upward, deregulated even more than was begun during the '90s, lived on corporate welfare from the government, turned a blind eye to greed, cozied up with lobbyists and special interests, and just generally screwed up. This time only three Republican Senators knew how to help out the country by joining with the other party. All the rest refused to help. Bipartisanship to the majority of Republicans means "my way or hit the road."

For the next four years, governing for Democrats will be a very rocky road. Surrounded by economic and foreign policy crises, second-guessed by the hypercritical mainstream media, rebuffed by Republicans, the Obama administration will be forced to get aid and comfort from the citizenry. Participatory democracy will be what saves the country during these trying times. Officials will have to call on all their considerable intellect, all their good faith, all their respect for the rule of law, and all the luck they can muster. Maybe the fact that this first big bill passed on Friday the 13th is a very good omen for governance by this group of fledgling statesmen and women.

See today's Behind the Links post -- "On a tough road" -- for all the pertinent links to news items associated with the stimulus package, the financial stability initiative, and the still empty Cabinet seats.

My "creativity and dreaming" post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics democrats republicans economy congress

It has become apparent that the bailout is a really big screwup. The payouts to the largest banks almost all exceed the actual value (market capitalization) of those institutions. For instance, Citbank has a market cap of about $19B but the bailout money Citibank has received so far is $45B. Simply stated that means Citibank is actually insolvent. The same applies to B of A and a significant number of other banks as well. The actual value (street value) of the toxic assets they are carrying on their books are products of investment instuments that should never have been allowed and which are the very ones that made this entire mess. It is pure financial shenanigans all the way.

There can be only one solution to this. That is to take over the insolvent institutions and work to get their finances in order and then resell them at a later date when this mess and the economy starts to get well. Sinking this amount of money into what are arguably failed instituions is ridiculous.

The way we are going about this is an attempt to preserve value where that value is vastly less than stated. In many cases that equates to 10 cents on a dollar and certainly less that 20 cents in the overall.

Taxpayers are being asked to make good on failed investments where the risk associated with those investments is simply being reassigned to taxpayers. This after the fact reassignment of risk is wrong in every way. There is no way that taxpayers have or can be construed to hold an interest in a failed investment strategy.
 
These losses will never be recovered because the losses were created by an intentional obfuscation of value. This is pretty much about falsely inflating stock values and profits. The companies responsible for this are now being made the recipients of taxpayer dollars where the actual fact is those companies committed fraudulent acts and should actually be prosecuted for those acts. It cannot be overstated how dysfunctional our system of finace has become. This is criminal all the way and there can be no argument that our major financial institutions were full partners in this criminal enterprise. And it is also quite obvious that the Congress of the United States changed laws governing the conduct of these intitutions which allowed for the creation of the financial intruments which have brought us to this end. The question the American people need to be asking is why did they do that and what were the circumstances upon which they made these changes.

It is becoming exceptionally difficult to ignore the overall circumstance of how this has occurred. The total set of events that have transpired over the years are contributors that set us up for this. I am having a very difficult time not connecting some obvious dots and arriving at some very disturbing conclusions. I don't see any of this as coincidental. It is too big a stretch to ignore all the things that had to happen which resolved to this mess. Accountability for this probably will never happen. Between government and the financial sector they collectively screwed the pooch big time. In my opinion this demands a complete isolation of the financial sector from government. That means they must be stripped from having any participation in the political process. I don't see any means to prevent a future occurrence of this except by eliminating the influence that undeniably has been a significant factor. There are those persons who will choose to close their eyes to this obvious condition but I don't see how they can do so. It would require a degree of dishonesty that is very much central to why this occurred to begin with. In fact anyone in our government or in the financial sector who might do so, in my opionion, is criminally liable. I know that won't be the conclusion. It is the fact though. Denying it is simply another lie. A whopper to be sure.

I am blessed with decent health, a good job, and healthy children. I have had the opportunity to visit other countries. I have been part of shows that included the famous names of the 20th century and now. I grew up the nation's capital, so that I am familiar with the landmarks and history therein. And I live in the country much of the world would like to immigrate to.

How much of that is my doing? Hardly any; as for most of us, I had help and opportunities that were necessary for me to get to this place, and the health of my children and myself is mostly luck. If I had talent, it's true I had to work to realize it, but so many have the same material and put in the same hours yet fail to arrive.

No one is truly self-made. And most of those less fortunate than I, simply did not have the right teacher, or didn't know of an opening, or weren't called for an interview. In the wrong neighborhood, or with unhelpful parents, they don't know what they missed.

Read more »

Last night I dreamed
The strangest dream

Assuredly, February is the wasteland and the cruelest month, not April.  Not just for them whose love lies over the ocean,  but for the many laborers who grow these floral tokens of love that people exchange on Valentine's  Day -- designated as Cupid's, celebrating couplehood, union and romantic love.

I dreamed, of you
Wrapping hyacinth chain
Around my heart  

I write of the cut-flower trade.  How much will you pay for those flowers you will buy to give to your love?  Will you think of the growers when your love smiles into your eyes?  Will you ask your florist for fair trade or certified/labeled flowers?  Will you know enough to do so? Will you ask that your florist provide a certificate of farming practices and look for the Fairtrade or VeriFlora labeling?  If you don't ask, the change won't be incorporated.

Calling me
Their flower child,
Your flower girl

The cut-flower trade is economically indispensable to the national economies of Kenya, Colombia, Netherlands and Israel, Ecuador, Uganda. All of them feed the increasing demands of markets in Japan, USA and Europe.   More countries are joining the cut-flower growing association of nations. Cut-flower production has environmental, social and economic consequences on the nations involved in the trade.  Growers move into areas where host nations are giving tax incentives for them to establish flower growing farms.  Most of the labor is female and many abuses have been documented.  The corporations who grow cut-flowers pollute the water and the land with the use of pesticides inside greenhouses which results in deteriorating health of people and their ecology.

Hyacinth girl

In Kenya, Lake Naivasha is literally being polluted and drained dry.    More insidiously, the growers are selling their flowers at the flower auctions in the Amsterdam so as to bypass the labeling.  This way, people buying the flowers think they are buy flowers from the Netherlands instead of Lake Naivasha.

Hued
Petal skinned
Smooth and scented

So this is how it works:  a country wanting to attract a cut-flower growing company will offer strong tax incentives. The neighboring nation, also wanting said growers in their home turf will offer another deal which undercuts the tax incentive offered by the first country.  A race to the bottom.  Once they get to the bottom, they skirmish with each other to see who can offer even more.  The growers take the one who offered the most. In the mean time, the govt of the selected nation is unable, in the long run, to provide basic human and infrastructural support for its own people.

Unfurling, from a bud
By your breath
in a word

Further considerations for growers to move the industry to the southern nations include a warmer climate which provides a longer growing season and more flower production.  Another reason to move to these areas  -- cheap land - readily available in that the acreage was once used for growing food has been converted into growing flowers exclusively.  The hard work is done mostly by a female labor pool.  Furthermore, governmental tax incentives to entice/invite the cut-flower industry into a country  has facilitated not only a race to the bottom but also produced a strong skirmish at the bottom with each country vying to outdo the other in terms of nation-bleeding tax incentives to woo the flower.  Nations give more and more in tax incentives and do so at a loss to their national economies and the growers don't invest in the localities where they have based their flower growing business and instead sell abroad and never share profits by improving the lives of the people who toiled the labor.

Hyacinth

Added to that, swaths of acreage has been taken away from agriculture and food cultivation and being switched to growing blooms for the European/Japanese/US market. Also, more people are moving to the flower growing regions in search of employment.  So, areas - like, around Bogota and Lake Naivasha, which once had locally owned farms for growing food, villages and communities are being disrupted, uprooted and overrun beyond capacity and food is no longer being grown there.

My skin tattooed,
With your finger whorls.
Mouth shaped.
Imprinting
My flower self


On top of that.  Agricultural chemicals and pesticides are sprayed by local workers who have not been trained in proper usage of such chemicals and don't have the appropriate protective gear.  They develop health issues as do their children.    Most flower workers are women and they are discouraged from joining unions, are discriminated against if they get pregnant, have to take a pregnancy test before they are hired, and employers will not pay for maternity leave.  Pesticides are sprayed inside the greenhouses.  The work is very hard.

I feel Hyacinth.
Am.

Growing flowers in East Africa and Latin America have made flowers available and inexpensive for the European/American/Japanese  consumer.  There are more flower outlets now  ---  flowers are available in every grocery store, big departments stores and at the florists.  Flower growers and sellers  in the US have been hurt.  As evidenced by occurrences like the planned downsizing of the San Francisco Flower Market.

Next year in Maui,
I will be your Plumeria girl. 

However, change is upon  the horizon as more and more green cut-flower growers join the trade, changing practices.  Local, independent growers who have roots in the area and are adopting eco/labor friendly ways of growing  cut-flowers. Be sure to watch the viddie!

Or a Rose
Jasmin d'Espagne
Jonquill or Iris
Fleur d'oranger
Alysse or Immortelle

Change, being the operative word has also made inroads into the lexicon of flower growers in Kenya.  They are starting to phase out certain practices and the use of such vile chemicals as methyl-bromide which is a fumigant and has the added bite of ozone depletion.

Honeysuckle
Pomegranate Flower
Belle de Jour
Forsythia

Hey, you could buy your Valentine a Fairtrade bouquet and take them out for beer!!  What a novel idea, combining two food groups! 

Flower language for
Their flower child.
A flower girl,
Yours.




[Valentine's Day is for bad poetry. Like, seriously bad poetry.  Come on!   ;)  Give yours too!!]

I've looked around the TPM blog titles throughout the day and evening.  Read a few, made a comment here and there.  I saw a couple of good ones about Valentine's Day.  Many more on the stimulus package written by intelligent, passionate bloggers.  One or two decrying Republicans for all sorts of things and a wide variety of everything else.  I was looking for something, anything, that made mention of 50 lives lost last night.  Perhaps I overlooked those.  Maybe I was too busy with myself and the state of the country as I see it.  That's all that matters, after all.

Can anyone explain what stops Coleman, assuming he loses at trial, from dragging out the appeals process until Franken's term is over?  It's not at all hard for a case to take six years from beginning to end, in federal court at least.  Is there a point at which the Minnesota law barring certification while litigation is ongoing gives way to something else?  If so, when and what?  Thanks in advance for any insights. 

Glenn Greenwald make some valid points concerning those
who would genuflect towards Obama.

Republican groups demand from
politicians support for their beliefs.
By contrast, as Judis describes,
Democratic groups -- including (perhaps
especially) liberal activist groups --
now (with some exceptions) lend their
allegiance to the party and its leader
regardless of how faithful the party
leadership is to their beliefs.  That
disparity means that there is often
great popular agitation and political
pressure exerted from the Right, but
almost none from the Left (I'm using the
terms "Left" and "Right" here in their
conventional sense:  "Right"  being the
core of the GOP and "Left" being those
who most consistently and vigorously
opposed Bush's foreign and domestic
policies).

During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted
huge portions of the Left and its
infrastructure so that their allegiance
became devoted to him and not to any
ideas.  Many online political and "news"
outlets -- including some liberal
political blogs -- discovered that the
most reliable way to massively increase
traffic was to capitalize on the
pro-Obama fervor by turning themselves
into pro-Obama cheerleading squads.
Grass-roots activist groups watched
their dues-paying membership rolls
explode the more they tapped into that
same sentiment and turned themselves
into Obama-supporting appendages.  Even
labor unions and long-standing Beltway
advocacy groups reaped substantial
benefits by identifying themselves as
loyal foot soldiers in the Obama
movement.

The major problem now is that these
entities -- the ones that ought to be
applying pressure on Obama from the Left
and opposing him when he moves too far
Right -- are now completely boxed in.
They've lost -- or, more accurately,
voluntarily relinquished -- their
independence.  They know that
criticizing -- let alone opposing --
Obama will mean that all those new
readers they won last year will leave;
that all those new dues-paying members
will go join some other, more
Obama-supportive organization; that they
will prompt intense backlash and anger
among the very people -- their members,
supporters and readers -- on whom they
have come to rely as the source of their
support, strength, and numbers.

As a result, there is very little
political or media structure to Obama's
Left that can or will criticize him,
even when he moves far to what the
Beltway calls the "center" or even the
Right (i.e., when he adopts large chunks
of the GOP position).  That situation is
extremely bad -- both for the Left and
for Obama.  It makes impossible what
very well might be the apocryphal though
still illuminating FDR anecdote:

    FDR was, of course, a consummate
political leader. In one situation, a
group came to him urging specific
actions in support of a cause in which
they deeply believed. He replied: "I
agree with you, I want to do it, now
make me do it."

As Judis points out, Obama, on some
issues, might move to the Right because
he wants to.  In other cases, he will do
so because he perceives that he has to,
because the combination of the
GOP/Blue-Dog-following-caucus/Beltway-media-mob
might force him to.  Regardless of
Obama's motives, the lack of a
meaningful, potent movement on the Left
to oppose that behavior ensures that it
will continue without any resistance.
The lack of any independent political
pressure from the Left ensures that
Obama will be either content to ignore
their views or will be forced to do so
even when he doesn't want to.

His point is well taken. Co-opting ones principals for the
individual generally comes to no good. If the left wants
their ideas to become reality, it needs to be far more
aggressive about pushing them. After all the right does
not seem to have a problem doing this. It's what gave
us 8 years of the chimp.

C

Xe?  Give me a break!

Honest to god.

The pay rules, which will limit bankers'
bonuses to just a third of their total
compensation and force them to take it
in stock that cannot be sold until their
companies repay the government funds,
have enraged Wall Street executives.

Bankers argued that the amendment,
introduced by Chris Dodd, a Democratic
senator from Connecticut, would cause a
brain drain from the industry and could
have the counterproductive effect of
raising cash salaries.

Bankers' bonuses are typically several
times their salaries and capping them at
one-third of their total compensation
would result in a large pay cut for many
high-flying Wall Street workers.

If only that were possible. It should be obvious that there
simply are no brains on Wall Street to drain.

C

As Republicans voted against the $789 billion stimulus package en masse again today, they were also publicly declaring that this ultimately unsuccessful strategy was actually a  victory. The whole process was a blessing, they said, because they have now "found their voice," as if that fact is supposed to send a shiver down Barack Obama's spine. In actuality, it probably means the complete opposite.

We all remember when Hillary Clinton declared she had "found her voice" after the New Hampshire primaries. It was her come from behind victory, her springboard to the nomination. And then she promptly got beat up in South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and about ten additional primaries.

Three months later, according to her biggest supporter Gov. Ed Rendell, she "found her voice" again in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Unfortunately for her, this was also the time everyone realized it was almost mathematically impossible for her to win the nomination.

John McCain was also great at "finding his voice." He actually found it a bunch of times. He was hoping he found it when he claimed, upon hearing about the Leyman Brothers collapse, that "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." But most people thought his real voice-finding experience was when he finally stopped beating around the bush and started calling Barack Obama a "socialist". Others think it was in his final days, which were marked by his obsession with Joe the Plumber. Whichever time it really was, we know it was after McCain's own advisers knew he couldn't win and didn't know whether they should tell him.

So, the Republicans can claim victory in the face of reality with this stimulus bill. They can smile for the cameras and say they finally "found their voice." But that press conference will make me smile, too, because it can only mean one thing: they can't win and they know it.

psa.blastmagazine.com

I like Robert Parry's take on the House especially.

Arguably, Obama is somewhat to blame for
this PR problem. He did try more than
probably made sense to reach out to
Republicans, speaking to their
congressional caucuses even before he
met with members from his own party.

Nevertheless, the bigger story is that
Mitch McConnell and other Republican
leaders appear to have committed
themselves to permanent trench warfare
against the new President out of a
calculation that his failure - and
presumably a worsening economy - will
boost Republican prospects in 2010.

Even senators, such as John McCain who
led the "Gang of 14" initiative to
prevent filibusters of Bush's
radical-right judicial nominees, have
embraced filibusters to cripple the
Obama administration.

Beyond the hypocrisy, this behavior
reflects a profound contempt for
democracy. Whether the Republicans like
it or not, the American people elected
Barack Obama by a decisive margin and
gave the Democrats increased majorities
in the House and Senate.

Instead of accepting those results and
serving as a loyal opposition, the
Republicans have fallen back to their
final line of defense - their strength
in the national news media - and they
have wheeled out the filibuster to blast
away at President Obama's hope of
enacting a coherent economic plan.

This strategy may or may not make for
smart politics - it certainly has
energized the Republican "base" but it
may be offending mainstream Americans
who want action on the economy.

But the GOP tactics don't represent the
natural way Washington has worked
throughout history. Filibustering at
every turn is not what a more
responsible generation of Republicans -
the likes of Bob Dole - would have done.

Agreed. However, I must say that these days responsible
and republican seem to be a contradiction in terms.

C

Perhaps I should not begin my first post here by 'shamelessly blogwhoring' but I just wrote over 2500 words on this topic, with twice as much again in the comments section, so I am going to summarize my argument briefly -- well, for me it's brief, but those who know me know that is an elastic word for me -- and then recommend the original post for more details.

Advocates for legalization -- which range from HIGH TIMES to Milton Friedman -- frequently point to the tax revenues legal marijuana might generate, to the better utilization of police and judicial time, to the savings on incarceration -- even to the reduction in plea bargaining and early release that the unclogging of court calendars and prison systems would bruing about.  All of these are perfectly valid arguments.  (I would argue the civil libertarian arguments, that people should have a right to consume a mostly harmless substance, especially when such more harmful substances as tobacco and alcohol are legal, while valid, are more likely to 'convince those who don't need convincing.')

But, afaik, no one has noticed the economic stimulus effect that legalization would produce, and it is major -- my calculations give a stimulus effect of $2 billion dollars -- a month.

The argument isn't a difficult one.

Read more »

I've been diligently watching the debate for the Stimulus Bill since it started. Everyday, I am amazed by the ability of certain members of a certain party to lie their asses off. They've lied about how we got into this mess. They've lied about their responsibility for enabling a certain former President to spend the surplus he entered office with down not just to zero point zero zero dollars, but negative gazillion billion point zero zero dollars.

This afternoon, things reached the hieght of sheer stupidity with the Senator from Utah claiming the fiscal conservatives have never had control of the federal budget since he's been in Washington. Oh Really?

They've whined about the lack of bipartisanship, while beating the hell out of three colleagues who made a good faith effort to be -- wait for it -- bipartisan.

But the absolute height of ridiculousness came when a Senator from Oklahoma claimed in his long rambling laundry list of wrongs done against him and his party by the "Democrat" party, that including a provision in this bill for light rail transportation -- in particular MagLev, magnetic levitation -- is wrong because MagLev transportation technology doesn't exist. Please allow me and the engineers who have created and installed and monitor magnetic levitation trains that run all around the world to call "Bullshit!"

How about this one that runs in China? (Oh wait... China doesn't count.)

The quiet low-pollution train will be mainly used in urban areas, Xinhua news service reported.

The train consumes less energy than faster maglev trains.

China opened the world's first commercial magnetic levitation train with the highest velocity of more than 267 miles per hour in Shanghai in 2002, based on German technology.

Maglev train lines have been considered as an effective means to deal with the heavy passenger flow in the Yangtze River Delta, one of the economic powerhouses in China, the news service said.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

And the article speaks of German technology. (Damn, Germany doesn't count either.) And heavens to Betsy that appears to be a real train in the picture unless of course it's been Photoshopped.

Using the Google to google the phrase "magnetic levitation train." one would find 47,600 references. But wait there's more. I recall as a much younger version of myself watching "the Wonderful World of Disney," and being mesmerized by the promises of the future as illustrated by the Disney imagineers. When promoting the new (back then) DisneyWorld park, future visitors were invited to ride on the MagLev train that would whisk you from the airport to the amusement park just Outside of Orlando. So once again using the Googler to google "Orlando maglev" there are 45,600 references to the Florida MagLev Demonstration project.

So the Senator's absurd assertion that the "technology doesn't exist" and the US wouldn't benefit from maglev rail systems is simply ludicrous on its face.

It doesn't take a genius to see this is why we continue to lag behind Europe and Asia in the development of alternative forms of transportation and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. When your so-called leaders are willing to step before not just their colleagues, but the C-Span cameras and hence, the voting public, and lie for the record and on the record, you have witnessed failed government.

But if that statement by the Senator was not enough, he proceeded to rail against changes to healthcare, promoting a Fox News story in which the former Lt. Gov. of New York, Betsy McCaughey, claims -- wrongly -- that this bill is the first step to socialized medicine in which you will lose your right to determine what your medical treatment will be. (Olbermann smashed this gem to pieces last night.)

The Republicans need to stop the lying. This is not a question of a lack of bipartisanship. It is partisan politics, pure and simple. But worse, it is subverting the very process those persons were elected to support and defend.

You cannot lead if you lie.

It is becoming increasingly clear that congressional Republicans are becoming merely television performers. Like Shannon Doherty they make occasional guest appearances on the air, she on the CW, they on FOX, CNN and MSNBC. Both are irrelevant to governmental affairs.

Shuler again votes against the Stimulation Plan and assures that he is a republican and gunning for the Senate in 2010 as a republican.

Can't wait for him to be done playing around as a democrat!

 

Looks like the Borg Collective (aka the Republican Party) has decided to go "all in" on this stimulus package.  It's actually one hell of a bet.  They are literally betting everything that the economy will remain in the dumper by the time November 2010 rolls around.  If the economy recovers, their losses in the Senate and House could be devastating to them for many years and possibly decades to come.

It tells me that they have convinced themselves that the desperate move was their only choice. They are betting the farm that only by their unanimous opposition to the plan, can they even think of saving what remains of their party (and of course Party First, Country Last will likely be the motto they are stuck with if the economy recovers).

I believe 45+ House Republicans were elected from districts that Barack won.  You would think that the safe vote would have been to go along to get along.  But they didn't!  Every single one has put his(her?) seat on the line here.

As despicable as the Borg Collective/Republican Party is, you can't say they didn't go "all in".

when even American Enterprise Institute economists are saying so.

"I think they know how big it is, but they don't want to say how big it is. It's so big they can't acknowledge it," said John H. Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to administration officials. "The lesson from Japan in the 1990s was that they should have stepped up and nationalized the banks."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/business/economy/13yen.html?em

Patriots and Tyrants

Before last week, all I knew about Papua New Guinea was that its capital was Port Moresby and that it was that island on top of Australia. But I've been writing a music series over at Dagblog and while I was searching the internet for examples of the country's musical offerings, I was fascinated to learn that over 700 languages are spoken there, that most of the island doesn't have access to television and can only be reached by airplanes, and that there is an incredible diversity of flora and fauna in the mountains and rainforests.

I watched one particularly interesting video about a still-existing tribe of cannibals. In the video diary, a group travels to the far interior of West Papua, which shares the island of New Guinea with PNG, but is under Indonesian control. There, they encounter a tribe that has never before laid eyes on any Caucasians. The video is about sixteen minutes long, and, at the end provides some insight into why there are reports this week about an increase in witch hunting in PNG.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTRvcROcWHg

Amnesty International reports:

Authorities in Papua New Guinea are being urged to take greater action to prevent further killings related to allegations of sorcery.

A father and son became the latest victims on Sunday. Local men in Ban village shot dead 60-year-old Plak Mel Doa and threw his body into a fire. His son, Anis Dua, was dragged from his home and burnt alive. Local people had accused them both of causing the death of a prominent member of the community by sorcery.

There has been an increase in reports of sorcery-related killings over the last year. According to the media there were over 50 such deaths in 2008.This is either because of an actual increase in such incidents or that more incidents are now being reported.

 

According to another report, this happened close to the city of Mount Hagan, which is the capital of the Western Highlands province and also where the Papua Tribe Festival featured in my PNG music blog takes place each year.

If watched the entire video, you learned that when there is an unexpected death, the Korowai tribe, ignorant of modern science and medicine, attributes the death to black magic, or khakhua. Relatives of the deceased exact revenge for the death by killing and eating the witch deemed responsible. How they determine the identity of the witch seems a little bit arbitrary.

On the east end of the island, in PNG, the witch hunting continues, without the cannibalistic aspect but by the same rationale. People place the blame for untimely death onto black magic, declare a witch, and then brutally murder her or him.

Crazy, right?

Maybe not. All of us look for something or someone to blame when things go amiss. At the moment, I'm fairly certain that, if someone wanted to burn one or two of those Wall Street bankers at the stake, I'd have to take a long, deep breath before suggesting that maybe it's not such a great idea.

When cause and effect is too complicated to be easily understood, we all want a scapegoat toward whom we can direct our anger and pain. Please don't get the idea that I think witch hunting in PNG should be allowed to continue because the grieving need to feel better. I'm with AI on this one, and maybe we could get the PNG Highlands some science textbooks while we're at it.

But why is it such a strong human desire to attribute blame and exact revenge? It's food for thought, hopefully only metaphorically speaking. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cross posted at Dagblog.com, where we promise not to hunt you down and cook your brains if you piss us off.

At 9:00 sharp this morning my blood pressure returned to normal and my mood improved considerably.  My local NPR station's Valentine's Day Fund Drive was over.  It would be a year until I would be urged to send a significant other, or even an insignificant other, a "decadent" gift of a half dozen mammoth strawberries lasciviously swirled in a potpourri of exotic chocolates from the darkest of the dark to the whitest of the white, or a dozen lust-inducing long-stemmed red roses, either for a mere $150.00 contribution, or wonder of wonders, both for $250.00.  (Caveat emptor-the adverts are down now and I'm reciting the pledge levels by memory).  

I had heard the plea often-at least every half hour during the "short" fund drive, and each time I was assured that my love, secret or otherwise, would be delighted to know I was thinking of her (or him) and would also know I was "thinking of others" through my pledge.  

    I suppose I ought to take a micro-second to thank everyone else who pledged in the drive, thereby showing their inamoratas how much they were thinking of me.  So done!  

But wracking my brain, I couldn't come up with a single friend who wouldn't think I had gone around the bend by sending them six over-sized, over-bred, over-dipped chocolates, or the dying sexual organs of plants, no matter how long the stems.  It isn't that my friends aren't romantic: they are.  But they don't confuse conspicuous consumption with undying affection.

So I guess my subconscious was feeling a little guilty last night-I hadn't demonstrated my devotion to the darlings of NPR by sending them $250 over and above the $22.00 a month they already get out of me, and I was feeling a little guilty that the rest of NPR land wouldn't know I was thinking of them while fattening down my love with gigantic strawberries.  At that time, I got a telephone solicitation-from Oxfam America and the young man on the line first thanked me for my sustaining membership and then explained that the current economic situation had cut back on donations and simultaneously raised the price of grains and other foodstuffs they use in their good works.  He then asked me to raise my monthly pledge by $1.00. 

Now I felt guilty for real.  I hadn't upped my donation in a couple of years, and Oxfam hadn't twisted my arm to do so.  I thought it time to think of others directly, and not through ricocheted appreciation of goods appropriate to yuppie wannabes.  So - I upped my pledge by $10.00 a month, thereby loving the good folk of Oxfam directly and the population they serve by extension-and I'm sharing this with the Café habitues because, in the words of NPR, modified to reflect my personal feelings, as evidence that I'm thinking of you good folks as well. This made me feel very jolly, and it was still cheaper than posh posies would have been.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Anti-science.  Anti-progress. Anti-intelligence.  Anti-alternative energy.  Anti-evolution. 

Interesting post up on Daily Kos by dengre:

Judd Gregg has a Jack Abramoff problem.

At the very least, Abramoff and his team had easy access to Gregg's Senate staff and were able to use that access to help their clients by stopping unfavorable legislation while getting earmarks and favorable legislation passed into law.

As it stands right now, Gregg's best defense is that he is a terrible manager and that "bad apples" joined his staff, went "rogue" and traded favors in his name. And to be fair, Gregg may be that dense. After all, look at the sloppy and moronic way he withdrew himself from consideration as Obama's Commerce Secretary: it was not the actions of a competent man. On the other hand, it was the actions of a man distracted other things. Gregg strikes me as a nervous man deeply worried about another shoe dropping.

Perhaps he is clean of scandal, but I suspect that Gregg had a fair understanding of what his staffers were doing in his name. After all, Kevin Koonce is not the only link between Senator Judd Gregg and Jack Abramoff.

Like most Republicans since 2005, Judd Gregg denies that he ever knew or had anything to do with Jack Abramoff. The money he returned from Abramoff's clients was just a coincidence. In fact--to hear Gregg or one of his fellow Republicans explain it--any of the growing list of links between Abramoff and Gregg or Abramoff and the Republican Party are just random points of unrelated data. Yeah, right.

They are tap dancing in the graveyard.

Read the entire post here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/2/13/32013/1373/707/696949

I'm still sticking by my belief that Gregg knew what he was getting into when he put his name forward for Commerce Secretary, but that something came up that made his big backtrack necessary, and I don't think it had anything to do with the sudden discovery that he was a fiscally conservative Republican.

The current economic crisis did not start on Wall Street.

It was the mortgage companies and brokers who laid the tinder, especially Countrywide, Calabasas, CA; IndyMac, Pasadena, CA; and Golden West, Oakland, CA. These companies, and their brethern in the wholesale mortgage channel together with the independent mortgage brokers, were the main purveyors of ARM, negative amortization, Alt A, and NINJA mortgages. They were the ones responsible for lax underwriting standards for mortgage origination.

It was the crude oil futures speculators who lit the match. Gas prices went from $2.25 to $3.00 / gallon in the spring of 2007 and then stayed relatively flat. In the spring of 2008 they went from $3.00 to $4.00 / gallon. As gas prices rose, those suburban McMansion plantations in places like Antelope Valley, Stockton, etc. that required a 2 hour auto commute to jobs in LA or the Bay Area did not look so attractive to buyers, and the housing prices started to fall in California.

Now the price of West Texas Intermediate is about $35.93, and the mainstream media portrays this as the price of oil. However, Brent Blend, Tapis, and other prices around the world are typically $7 / barrel higher -- in the vicinity of $43 / barrel.

The speculators are setting us up again -- this time to kill alternative energy development in the United States. A $25 / barrel tax on crude oil would be a good thing.

I recently wrote about an idea of the government giving coupons to all Americans for specific big items like cars, homes, refrigerators, stoves, energy efficient items for your home, etc..

This idea would force the consumer to 'spend' the coupon to profit from it.  This is a better idea than to just hand out cash risking the consumer just 'saving' it.  This idea would also give money to the businesses you buy from (they return coupons to government for repayment) helping them to stay in business during the worst part of this recession.

During that post I had written, somebody suggested using credit cards with an expiration date. This would be a good idea too.  It would put a deadline on how long the money would handed out from tax dollars.

I continue to think this idea would have been good.  I think it could also work for the housing market troubles. It would also be a way to audit what was spent and by whom. 

Instead of the government just handing money to banks to pay off bad debt, give the homeowner a coupon or gift card to give to their bank or loan company.  It would pay off a percentage of their bad debt and trigger a new formula to be used by that bank to calculate the new monthly payments for that homemaker.  Each bank that did this would in turn fill out the paperwork showing the new formula, payment and coupon for the homeowner.  They would then send that info back to the government for payment of the bad debt.  This leaves an audit trail.

Of course if the homeowner cannot meet the new payment plan, they would have to turn the home over to the bank.  Yes they would lose their home; but they'd also have no mortgage to pay.  The government paid off the old debt.  The bank could then sell the home at its current value.

Being no expert about mortgages and bad debt - can any of you find a flaw in this logic (other than the fact that Americans have just paid that debt with their tax dollars)?  Wouldn't this process get home values back to what they should be?  And wouldn't that also help other home owners to get back the value of 'their' homes?

I never thought much about bonuses till recently, when taxpayer money was used to fund them.  And today I am applying the same reasoning which proved so helpful in understanding indulgences to this new topic - with interesting results.  Indeed, you may come to see that a bonus is kind of like an indulgence.  A scam by another name.

Taxpayers, to my knowledge, have funded two kinds of bonus.  One kind, I've realized, is a bribe.  The other kind, I believe, is extortion.  And both kinds are given to classes of people who have been renamed as "special."  Indeed, I wonder if the renaming is part of the bribery here.  Call them something special:  It's part of the scam on the taxpayer.

One kind of bonus is for special people called heroes, and sometimes our finest and bravest. Though heroes, some must apparently be lured into staying heroes by something called the signing bonus.  Because apparently they might leave in droves, unless bribed to sign this paper for another term of voluntary service.

Mind you, I am not denigrating their bravery or status as heroes, just pondering that society must bribe some people to be its brave heroes.

Something seems fishy here.  In my childhood it was different, you see.  Nobody was bribed.  They were just forced.  Now they call it voluntary.  But they have to bribe them to volunteer.  Do you notice the similarity with indulgences?  (If you volunteer to go to confession, you can get an indulgence.)

I mention that because not all heroes need bonuses (indulgences).  For example, our first responders, police and fire fighters and medical personnel.  These folks apparently will not leave their jobs in droves.  No bribery needed.  They are brave and heroic but never bribed.   First responders are true volunteers.  Yes, we pay them.  But we don't need to bribe them to stay.

Not that I'm blaming the ones who accept the signing bonus, mind you.  We, the taxpayers, put them in that position.  Maybe we want to rethink that.  And rethink war too.  But I digress...

The second type of bonus has me aghast.  This kind of bonus didn't even happen via the Congress passing a law or by government regulation.  Nope, this kind happened by a type of theft.  Taxpayer money was taken and paid to people who call themselves the best and the brightest.  Notice the special term again.  These folks, just like the heroes, would apparently leave their jobs too.  But in this case they use that as a threat.  They expect a bonus as a price for staying.  To me that's extortion.  We taxpayers are being extorted by a certain class of people - to the tune of twenty billion dollars!

Extortion is a crime.  So is theft.  To my mind the extortionists are folks who figured out how to fashion fancy financial fluff into stuff they sold right and left, which is now worthless.  The so-called best and brightest thieves.  The ones who engineered this worldwide financial mess.  Those are the ones who expect a bonus.  A taxpayer bonus.  On top of high salaries.  Half a million being too low.

Now I don't know about you.  But I feel kind of sad for the heroes lured into the signing bonus because they're actually doing work for the taxpayer.  They're not out to rob us.  And indeed they do real hero work.  But it does make me sad that they pretend these folks are volunteering, when really we're paying them a bribe.

On the other hand I am mad as a hornet at these other folks, who decided to call themselves the best and the brightest.  And who demand, who extort, billions of dollars - when they've already robbed and cheated millions of people, using fancy financial fluff fashioned to fool folks - to the tune of trillions lost!

Simple put: Get out of Washington.

There are plenty of Republicans outside of Washington, in fact there are plenty of Republicans outside of Washington who's interest and philosophy is more closely aligned with Obama than, say, John Boehner, or Rush Limbaugh, or Grover Norquist (or whomever is directing Washington Republicans these days).

The ultra-partisan minority of the Republican party is clawing and gasping for relevance, why grant it to them?

Governors, mayors, former senators, former members of congress, members of former administrations --lots of non "hyper-partisan" (a generous term for bat-shit crazy) Republicans to draw from...

Just a thought.

From Think Progress

In recent days, several of President Bush's closest advisers have been attacking President Obama. Vice Preisdent Cheney, for example, said that there was "high probability" of a WMD attack if Bush's policies were reversed, and former chief of staff Andy Card said that Obama has turned the White House into a "locker room" because he isn't requiring staff to wear jackets at all times. Axelrod sharply responds to the "tasteless" criticisms in a new interview with the Washington Post:

"I was disappointed in the Vice President's comments, ...

You know, the last thing that I think we're looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove, anyone who's read the newspapers for the last eight years would laugh at that.

...I mentioned Andy Card saying that we were somehow denigrating the Presidency because people were wearing short sleeves in the Oval Office. We're wearing short sleeves because we have to roll up our sleeves and clean up the mess that we inherited."

Reading Tannehaus's Essay "Conservatism is Dead" in the New Republic he makes the case what the Obama, Democratic Congress and the entire US Society is up against:

Yet, even as the right begins to regroup, it is not clear that its leaders have absorbed the full implications of their [party's] defeat. They readily concede that the Democrats are in charge and, in Obama, have a leader of rare political skills. Many on the right also admit that the specific failures of the outgoing administration were legion. But what of the verdict issued on movement conservatism itself?

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions [political pragmatism]. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare. [AKA the Cultural War]

They, the now Republicans, now the completely taken over by the right are now cornered like a wounded animal where they occupy the proverbial political place of irrelevance, as authored by the former Senator Hagel, who happened to be one of the last 'Burkian' Republicans who expressed the concepts of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. 

But what of the time honored tradition that the previous Administration who were able to silence their criticisms following recent transitions. Today that is gone for the right revolution is on life-support politically.  The right knows they are facing obsolesce, both as the numbers in elected seats attest and a few conscious ones know they failed to perform the essential component to sustain any political power---ultimately every government, every ideology, every political movement is eventually measured by its ability to use it powers to make better its own society, otherwise it turns into a reactionary goon squad. Is that not what the Bush Administration emerged to be?  Tannehaus continues:

One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right [the original neo-con's] but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. [social conservatives, evangelical conservatives, paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives]. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy--"statist" social programs; "socialized medicine"; "big labor"; "activist" Supreme Court justices, the "media elite"; "tenured radicals" on university faculties; "experts" in and out of government.  But, if it's clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s.

Ahh the reason we locked into this solidarity of opposition by the Congressional Republicans who are now dominated by the right's ideologues, is it . They are fixated against the New Deal, its new social contract of relevancy, of actually solving intolerable problems of the industrial-capitalist society expressed by things like "socialized medicine" while 50M Americans are uninsured. They are opposed to fiscal regulation while we know speculation becomes rampant when commercial banks are merged with investment banks. They opposed modern governance and why they hold Reagan as a pseudo deity in his ideology that "government is the enemy" where in reality that statement held the the entire objective to undo the New Deal.

That is really what Rove's ideal of a permanent Republican majority that fell apart the day a hurricane came to Louisiana's shores. At each juncture the right's ideology failed to solve basic governance competency and yet they scream and holler about shirt sleeves, torture and fiscal responsibility. What they are screaming about is not shirt sleeve style, they are hollering that once this generation sees an actual effort and results of making government work their basic mantra is dead, except for their own echo chambers. Tannehaus says conservatism is dead, I say then lets bury too, dressed in their suits and ties and along with Limbaugh and O'Reilly's megaphones.

Frank Schaeffer explains why in this open letter.

Dear President Obama:

I know that from time to time you
read Huffington Post because you've
written for it. As a Huffington Post
reader you'll know that no one on
this web site has more faithfully
supported your candidacy and now your
presidency than me. As a former
lifelong Republican, son of a
co-founder of the Religious Right; my
late evangelical leader father,
Francis Schaeffer, I'm in a unique
position to tell you a few things
about the Republicans from inside
perspective. (As you know I left that
movement in the mid 1980s.)

The lack of cooperation you're
getting from the Republican Party
will continue. You were right to
indulge in a little bit of tokenism
when you had to Pastor Rick Warren
pray at your inauguration. But if you
think that the Republicans in
Congress and the Senate are going to
do more than their utmost to obstruct
everything you are and what you stand
for you're dreaming.

As someone who appeared numerous
times on the 700 Club with Pat
Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry
Falwell used to send his private jet
to bring me to speak at his college,
as an author who had James Dobson
giveaway 150,000 copies of my one of
my fundamentalist "books" allow me to
explain something: the Republican
Party is controlled by two
ideological groups. First, is the
Religious Right. Second, are the
neoconservatives. Both groups share
one thing in common: they are driven
by fear and paranoia. Between them
there is no Republican "center" for
you to appeal to, just two versions
of hate-filled extremes.

The Religious Right supply the kind
of people who at McCain and Palin
rallies were yelling things such as
"kill him" about you. That's the
constituency to which your hand was
extended when looking for compromise
on your financial bailout bill.

There's only one thing that makes
sense for you now. Mr. President, you
need to forget a bipartisan approach
and get on with the business of
governing by winning each battle. You
will never be able to work with the
Republicans because they hate you.
Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann
Coulter are the norm not the
exception. James Dobson and the rest
are praying for you to fail. The
neoconservatives are gnashing their
teeth and waiting for you to "sell
out Israel" or "show weakness" in
Afghanistan, whatever, so they can
declare you a traitor.

The problem is that when you deal
with the Republican Party you're
talking to the polished characters in
Washington. I wish you could see the
hate e-mail's that I have received
over the last two years because I
supported you, letters calling for
God to kill me, telling me that I
hate God because I supported you and
that I am "an abortionist" and worse
a "fag lover" because I've written
that I believe that you will be a
great president.

What those senators and congressmen
are telling you is not what their
rabid core constituents are telling
them. Their loyalty is to a
fundamentalist Christian ideology on
the one hand and American
exceptionalism of perpetual warfare
and hatred and fear of the "other" on
the other hand. Between the
neoconservatives and evangelical
Religious Right Republicans you have
no friends.

The good news is that most Americans
support you. And if you will just get
in the face of the Republican Party
and call their bluff you'll be
surprised how many individual
ordinary Republicans will support
you, not to mention the rest of us.
America is sick of the Republicans.

The Democratic Party won for a
reason: the Republicans failed and
have taken us all down with them!
You're doing your presidency and
America no favor by extending an open
hand to the perpetually knotted fist
of what has become the embittered
lunatic fringe of our country. They
would rather go down in flames than
"compromise" their ideology.

As you showed us again at your press
conference of Feb 9, you are a
brilliant, articulate and decent man.
Your Republican opponents are not
decent people but ideologues bent on
destroying you. To quote the biblical
adage sir, don't cast your pearls
before swine.

Enough said.

Update:  Rahm Emanuel sees bipartisanship as a problem.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
conceded President Barack Obama and his
team lost control of the message for
selling their massive stimulus bill last
week, fixating on bipartisanship while
Republicans were savaging the legislation.

But in a wide ranging interview with
reporters, Mr. Emanuel said the
president's travels across the country
this week have shored up support for the
$789 billion measure. He strongly defended
the young Obama administration against
charges that its opening weeks have been
amateurish and mistake-prone.

Yes..I'd say so. Hope Obama has learned something from this.
Mainly that trying to deal with republicans is about as fruitless
a gesture as trying to calm a charging rhino.

C

Goldman seems to have come through the current banking crisis in surprisingly decent form. And so perhaps they should be listened to when it comes to solutions for fixing the financial system, and the reducing the risk of prolonging or repeating the current problems.

Is their success due to their superior risk management? Or is it, as some grumble, because one of their own was making the calls on government moves at the height of the crisis? After all, the fall of Lehman - which Paulson insisted on - triggered a $20 bn payout to Goldman. Not bad for a day's work.

But let's stop the veiled accusations and see what Goldman's vaunted risk management amounted to. From the Bank of England's Director of Financial Stability Andrew Haldane:

Risk managers are of course known for their pessimistic streak. Back in August 2007, the Chief Financial Officer of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, commented to the Financial Times: "We are seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row"

In layman's terms, according to Goldman's risk model, the events of the summer 2007 (we're talking about the slight tremors that preceded the blowup of a year later) were predicted to have only a slight chance of ever happening. How slight? One 25 standard deviation move is predicted to occur once every 6 x 10124 lives of the universe. So how about 'several 25-standard deviation moves' in a row? According to Haldane, it just doesn't compute.

And what caused those tremors in 2007? House prices had started declining and, surprise, subprime borrowers were defaulting. This is the event that Goldman's golden boys computed as not possible to happen ever in this or any other mathematically conceivable universe.

So did Goldman navigate the credit crisis successfully due to superior risk management? Unlikely. By september it had a massive outstanding bet on the simultaneous (i) failure of a major investment bank and (ii) survival of a major insurer able to pay out several dozen billion in default insurance. A dumb bet on two counts: by the summer of 2008 the market took the noises coming from Treasury (and past handling of failing investment banks) to be a tacit guarantee of bank debt. Secondly, the main reason to avoid the failure of a major financial institution was the likely inability of even big players such as AIG to honor their massive related insurance obligations. Luckily for the Goldmanati, they had an alternative risk management model, much more accurate in predicting such unlikely market events. It's name: Hank Paulson.

Some of this is old news, but worth keeping in mind as the Golden Boys decide to 'advise' the Goldman-deficient Obama administration on the bailout plans.

*Thanks to TPM reader eds for reminding me of the AIG debacle.   
 
  

On Lincoln's 200th birthday, in the latest of a long series of tributes to Lincoln, Obama cast Lincoln as the avatar of union - that is, of commitment to the collective effort that removes the fetters from individual effort. He drew his usual long historical framework: that we can meet the challenges of the moment because "we have been here before" -- Americans have, historically, mustered the collective will required to meet enormous challenges. Within that larger story, he set his usual shorter historical narrative -- the story of the last thirty years -- with unusual clarity and compression.

The short frame is: Reagan was a legitimate corrective to a state that had grown bloated; the Republicans who followed him were an overcorrection; it is time to restore collective effort, commitment to the common good, faith in government as a instrument in collective problem solving. Obama implicitly casts himself as an instrument of democratic self-correction:

And yet, while our challenges may be new, they did not come about overnight. Ultimately, they result from a failure to meet the test that Lincoln set. To be sure, there have been times in our history when our government has misjudged what we can do by individual effort alone, and what we can only do together; when it has done things that people can - or should - do for themselves. Our welfare system, for example, too often dampened individual initiative, discouraging people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility. With respect to education, we have all too frequently lost sight of the role of parents, rather than government, in cultivating a thirst for knowledge and instilling those qualities of a good character - hard work, discipline, and integrity - that are so important to educational achievement and professional success.

But in recent years, we've seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. It's a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government - this constant rejection of any common endeavor - cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges. It cannot refurbish our schools or modernize our health care system; lead to the next medical discovery or yield the research and technology that will spark a clean energy economy.

Once again, Obama casts moving the center left as a restoration of core American values. (Elsewhere, he's drafted not only Lincoln but Hamilton into this historical narrative -- two of our leaders,  who arguably did most to empower industrial and financial elites, as well as strong central government and collective effort.) He presents Lincoln's railroads, and his land grants, and his land-grant colleges, as precursors of his own intended alternative energy investments, and job creation, and school reform. He embraces Lincoln's injunction to "lift artificial weights from all shoulders [and give] all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life" as the essence of what he has often defined as the always-unfinished American drive toward a "more perfect union."

After months on the campaign trail, newly inaugurated President Obama may have hoped to work from home, govern from the White House and spend every evening with his kids.  Fuhgetaboudit.  After just a few weeks it is obvious that Obama and associates in the White House and the Cabinet have to keep traveling around the country, with the President himself going out of almost every week like a medieval king in the preabsolutist era making a "progress" from region to region.  The United States is in crisis while DC talking heads remain as irresponsible and out of touch as ever; they are like the aristocrats of Old Regime France well after the revolution had started.  To escape the aristocratic death grip, Obama must do all kinds of outreach -- including to Republicans with real world responsibilities -- in the states and cities across the country that are grappling with the concrete human and business realities of this gathering depression, as well as living out the consequences of the terrible policies of the past several decades.

Read more »

In honor of George's first talking job, I want to point at the potential of a 'stimulus' package, the reasons stimulus is needed so badly, and the ways we're going to flush it down the toilet by being high-minded. Yes, somebody hired him (in Calgary) to speak at a luncheon. Him, speaking. In short, we need the stimulus to address the parts of the economy where humans live, because we've allowed the schemers on Wall Street to run the world too long, and being high-minded enough to let the Republicans influence it ensures its failure: They fail at stuff like government, it's in their platform.

A MYSTERY PART DEAUX    

The morning always comes sooner when you cogitate through most of the night.  Sir Rathbone really attempted to fit all the clues into some paradigm over his favorite scotch and this new vice from Asia he received through new trade contacts during the holy wars.  Rathbone, on his third pipe came up with an idea and promptly fell asleep in his chair.

An hour or so after sunrise, he awoke and went for a wash in the communal baths.  Gawain was there and the two struck up a conversation.

I heard there was a death last night.

Yes, Gawain, and I am in the middle of investigating a murder!!!

Was it Sir Lagamor?  He was beloved by all here.

Yes, Gawain.  But tell me some things about Sir Lagamor.  I have only come here of late at the invitation of Bedivere and am not familiar with the habits and customs at Camelot.

Sir Lagamor was kind of a mascot for Camelot.  At all events he was made prominent.  No one held bad feelings toward this Christian knight.  I had been his squire some fifteen twlevemonths ago, when I was but a lad.  He was a stern teacher but always rewarded me for chivalrous behavior and when he saw bravery in my actions.

But surely, some one at some time was grieved by Lagamor as the most Christian of Christian knights might cause someone to be grieved.

But Lagamor, like I have already related carried no sins like those most of us do.  He had not been in battle since Badon where he showed himself above and beyond what anyone had remembered.  Arthur, my King, had fallen off of his steed and Lagamor came out of nowhere and picked him up and taken him to a small mound where I espied him and brought him a new steed.

My study of this war demonstrated that King Lot, some call him the evil King Lot, held much animus toward King Arthur and his knights and yet, would visit the castle from time to time. And I had even heard that confederates of his dwell here even as we bathe in peace.

Oh, Duke Largo and William of Riley are present here.  I really had not thought much about them. My brother always throws ugly words at them, but they stay away from me, I am proud to say.  By the Battle of Badon of course, Lot had 'joined the cause' so that he might not be frozen out of the spoils. And his wife, Morganna, holds great hate against her half brother the King and most of the knights who dwell here.

Well, Gawain, if Largo and Riley are here, that would mean there are at least two enemies of Lagamor, doest not thou think?

Rathbone, you have a point.  But beware, it is not of use to voice rumors or possibilities without proof.

Oh, I am schooled in such things dear boy, and all I am asking is your help.  And I needs you to keep this conversation between us and tell no one. Is that a deal struck between us?

Yes, yes. I will not even tell my best friend and brother Gareth. And certainly not emissaries of my father Lot.

Rathbone winced.  He had forgotten that the entire time Gawain had spoke of Lot he was speaking of his own father.  But fiefs were of the utmost import among knights and nothing would stand in the way of Gawain's honor toward his king. Morganna, of course, was Gawain's step mother and he owed her no allegiance.  Tell me though Gawain, where do Largo and Riley bed?

Come, we will dress and I will show you on the sly so as not to be noticed.

The two quickly dressed and with diligence proceeded to the upper floors.  

This is their bed Rathbone.  Two soldiers and their squires were asleep in the small room.  The stench of ale and old socks permeated the airs.

Let us leave this place.  And the two proceeded to Rathbone's quarters.

Watson. Watson.

Yes, Sir Rathbone. I am here but I have brought someone.

Oh, there you are Watson.  What's this then?

I brought Snerf and Macaca. Snerf, show Sir Rathbone what you have shown me.

Snerf brought out a kerchief from his pocket that had belonged to Palidan. Macaca, here...now find Palidan's sword.

HAHHHHHH. HAHHHHHH. Macaca shrieked.  He always shrieked in capital letters also. Macaca jumped up and down off the gables, swinging to and fro, fro and to.  African monkeys always had a good sense of smell.  Not as keen as dogs, but because of their reasoning abilities they were better able to make use of scent.  The humans proceeded to follow the lower hominid around the rear portion of the castle.

Up in the rafters, in the corner of the room above the dungeon, Macaca began shrieking again and brought down Palidan's sword and brought it to Snerf.  Snerf looked it over and handed it to Rathbone, noting that there was dried blood upon the curved blade.

Sir Rathbone spoke.  This was the murder weapon.  Since there is no CSI we work with the clues we can discern with today's technology.  Clearly the sword was missing from Palidan's chest and surely it was hidden here, in the rafters so as to escape discovery.  Clearly this blood gives the reason for why it was hidden.  And surely, it was hidden here by a very tall murderer.

Very tall? Watson and Snerf called out at the same time.

Yes Watson.  Elementary, really.  Over in that corner is a stool, but in order to reach the rafters, the person hiding the weapon would have to be tall enough to reach while standing on the stool.

Watson grabbed the stool and brought it to the location where the sword was discovered.  He stood on the stool and he was clearly a foot and a half too short to have been able to have placed the sword where it had been found by the monkey.

Snerf noted that: There is only one man large enough to have reached the rafters from that stool and that is Beau Manes. But Beau Manes would not hurt a flea unless ordered to do so.

Go and fetch this Manes fellow at once Snerf.

Snerf returned shortly and Beau Manes appeared. Gawain began laughing.  Rathbone shushed him and ordered Beau to stand on the stool. The stool promptly broke into six pieces.

Tell me Gawain, what are you laughing at.  

So-called Beau Manes is my brother Gaharis.  Garahis, when didst thou start working in the kitchen?

About two moons ago.

Well go back and I will tell no one.

That is my brother Gaharis and he did not kill anyone and he has never stolen or even borrowed anything in his whole life.  When we were kids, Gareth and I once buried him alive and when we chickened out and returned, he was sitting on a mound of dirt laughing.  He could have killed us both with one great swing of his fists and he would not hurt his brothers, no matter how evil we were.  Hahahahahahahahahahahaha

Hmmmmmmmmmh. Hummed Rathbone.  Then that settles it, who ever did this foul deed had to have had a monkey like Macaca.  Or some such animal.  We shall attend the festivities tonight and Snerf shall hide in here.  Is that all right Snerf?

Yes, Govner. Snerf always wanted to say Govner and this was his first chance.

Good. We shall come and check on you at ten bells.

That night, Leonardo,  the court jester would perform and Tristan would sing.

Everyone was present with the King presiding.

Everyone except Lancelot and Palidan of course.

Oh and Dobbs. But no one seemed to have missed fathead.  All he would ever do was go on and on about illegal Angles.  We shall look into how he is faring later.

Leonardo began the proceedings.

Ladies and gents, motherf%^$#rs and fatherf%^$#rs.....

With that, the King gave the signal to the royal stickman.  This fellow was rather large with a mask that made him look like the Royal Executioner.  As a matter of fact he was the Royal Executioner, but that is another story.

The stickman, would, on cue from the King, hit Leonardo over the head with a long flat stick.

Leonardo, stunned, got up immediately, as he was wont to do.  As he did so, the crowd laughed and laughed and laughed.  It worked every time. After regaining his composure, Leonardo began again.

A funny thing happened on the way to Camelot this morning. The local chaplain stopped to ask me if I could grant his indulgence concerning some question he had about the show tonight and I told him, hey, you're the one in charge of indulgences. Silence.
The King gave the stickman the word and, well you can guess the rest.

Meantime, out by the rafters....

Snerf and Macaca were in the ill lighted room, hiding in the shadows caused by the ill light.

NINE BELLS, NINE BELLS, NINE BELLS

That was the signal for nine bells.  Ever since the Great Bell of Camelot broke over a twelvemonth ago, the bell man had to yell out the time by the hour.  

Just then there was movement from the open door into the room.  Snerf looked at Macaca.
Earlier that evening, under orders by Rathbone, Snerf had given his monkey a wooden sword to hide in the rafters where they had discovered Palidan's sword.  The thing moved slowly across the floor toward the area where the sword was hidden.

Snerf gave the cue to Macaca to get Rathbone. That was one clever monkey.  Quickly, but quietly, he scampered out to the hall and ran to the show in the Royal Living Room.

Meanwhile, back at the RLR...

The fourteenth time that Leonardo had been hit by the stickman, he chose not to get up. That was the cue for Tristan to present a musical piece for the evenings festivities:


We sailed on the ship Belle Tres
My grandfather and me
Around Tin-ta-gel we did roam
Drinkin all night
Got into a fight
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

So hoist up the Belle Tres Sails
See how the main sail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home
Let me go home
I wanna go home, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

The first mate he got drunk
Broke in the cap'ns trunk
The sheriff had to come
And take him away
Sheriff John Stone
Why don't you leave me alone
Yeah, yeah
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

So hoist up the Belle Tres Sail
See how the main sail sets
Call for the captain ashore
Let me go home
Let me go home
I wanna go home, yeah yeah
Well I feel so broke up
I wanna go home

Tristan as usual, received his standing ovation. And just then, Macaca flew in via the rafters and alit on the lap of Sir Rathbone.

Rathbone turned to Watson, the game's afoot, grab Bedivere.

Rathbone immediately ran to the place where Snerf awaited.  Just as he arrived, he saw the creature climbing or rather sliming up the wall to the rafter where Palidan's sword had been.
Within minutes Bedivere showed up with Watson and three of the King's guards with cross bows.

Fire, ordered Bedivere and with that two of the guards nailed the green slime.

The stinky, slimy thing slowly dripped onto the floor. Rathbone hurried to the puddle.
What, what, what.  Rathbone always spoke like that when he was nervous. The odor was atrocious and the King was not even there.

A very tall, muscular guy with a shaven head was asking me in a club (Eastern Europe) last night if I liked Obama.  I enthused (as always, when asked this question) that I not only liked him but was an active supporter.

This set him off ("Why?!"), and he explained that he had obtained information from Mein Kampf that blacks are bad.  Not knowing how to respond, I asked him if he thought Bush was better (that may have been the wrong tack, and I was surely unprepared).  He grabbed a knife and indicated that if Bush were present, he would stab him, flashing tattoos and thrusting the knife to his right while making inchoate references to military combat.  McCain, he said, was just an old man.  I tried to tell him to give Obama a year and he might see the good side, but to logic didn't help, and this was seeming diffused as he wanted to take pictures and I cheerily went along with that and he gave me pics on my flash.

Around an hour later, I realized he was demonstratively holding his hands as though training a pistol at my head for an extended time.  This is a low-security environment, and one is usually better off making nice than trying to involve guards, who won't offer much help (and who in this case, were no match for the skinhead).  I cheerily wished the chap a great weekend as I later exited, hoping he wouldn't follow me out and a bit relieved when he didn't.  Many/most in Eastern Europe/ex-USSR are howling racists anyway, though many are relieved to see somebody who appears well-qualified take away Bush's chair and some seem to be coming around.  First time I have heard Mein Kampf sourced as supposedly persuasive argumentation.

 

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

-- Socrates

 

The Princess and the Frog

by

Justice Putnam

 

 

 

She said she chose me because I was the best behaved in the whole pond. I guess those etiquette lessons my frog aunts taught me when I was a tadpole really helped. All those Saturday night Brown Derby dinners dressed in my little tadpole-sized frog tuxedo, my frog aunts in their pearls and gloves, all seated in our special Brown Derby frog booth, somehow all that prepared me for the chance of a frog lifetime; to be kissed by the most beautiful Princess in the world.

I must tell you, everything we frogs heard was true. The sun back-lit her dark red curls, her full ruby lips touched mine. I remember she tasted of lavender and orange. The transformation was magical; I was no longer the ugly frog. I became her handsome Prince standing tall and strong and happy!

Oh, sure. She had to change my wardrobe and make it more diverse, as a Prince's wardrobe must be. I was mostly into turtlenecks because I thought it would hide my frog throat more. But she liked the open collar look, she said, because she liked how manly a strong neck was. I always thought my best part were my legs! Such is the mystery of the most beautiful Princess in the world.

She insisted I grow my hair longer. I took to sporting a goatee and wearing little round sunglasses. I grew accustomed to jet lag on royal visits to her ancestral homes in Europe.

I became her Prince, but she seemed unhappy.

We had just returned from a weekend at the home of my best bullfrog friend. His property included some of the best mud baths in all of Sonoma County.

"Your frog friends are ill mannered and uncouth," she sobbed, "they smack their lips when they eat and use terrible grammar. You must choose them or me and if you choose them, you will not be my Prince!"

I didn't know that the spell could be reversed. I thought, once kissed and transformed, a Prince forever you would be.

"Are you serious?" my Bullfrog friend spit at me later when I told him of the ultimatum. "You think you're a Prince? She's too good for you, man. She's way out of your league. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You might be a Prince, but in your eyes, not hers! What made you think you could keep a woman like that happy? I hate to hurt your feelings, but at least you have feelings to hurt!"

All of my frog friends practice "tough truth," but knowledge of that has never lessened the sting of their observations.

A note sat on the table when I came through the door that hot afternoon. She had gone and would not be back. I went to the bathroom and looked at the mirror there.

I knew which fork to use for the salad and how to swirl a vintage red to check its legs. But there was no mistaking it.

I had always been a frog.

But now I was one with a goatee and little round sunglasses.

 

© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

 

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic thinks so:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/the-gop-has-dec.html

So does this guy: http://daily44.wordpress.com

The Repubican party does not care about the country though that's for sure!

 

I’ll be alone on Valentine’s Day. Watching everyone outside enjoying these balmy last few days had me humming some Marshall Crenshaw:

Girls! girls! girls!
When I’m walking downtown on a summer’s day, yeah
Girls! girls! girls!
All my troubles seem ten thousand miles away
I fall in love from my head to my feet
When I’m watchin’ all those girls walkin’ down the street
The feelin’ goes to my head like red wine
You know I feel fine ‘cause all I ever have in mind is
Girls! girls! girls!
You girls are driving me wiiiiiiiiiild (yeah-eah)
And I said wiiiiiiiiiild (yeah-eah)

But How the Crash Will Reshape America has me looking for a Cynical Girl to help us through the tough times:

Well I’m goin out
I’m goin out lookin’ for a cynical girl
Who’s got no use for the real world
I’m lookin’ for a cynical girl

Well I’ll know right away by the look in her eye
She harbors no illusions and she’s worldly-wise
And I’ll know when I give her a listen that she
She’s what Ive been missin’
What I’ve been missin’

Far from cynical, DOT Commish Janette Sadik-Khan shows her cyclist’s gams and describes how the DOT has made room for more than just auto traffic on the streets of New York:

So ‘round and ‘round and ‘round we go
Through seventeen lights in a row
Take a hold of my hand and come with me
We’ll go rockin’ around in NYC

Someone should slip a box of Godiva into her pannier. NYC won a sustainable transport award, beating out Beijing, Milan, Istanbul and Mexico City.

New Yawk has transit and foot traffic to sustain urban zones, but rerouting auto traffic can kill off businesses in smaller towns. Allen Hancock thinks Demand-Responsive Transit (DRT) can combine cell phones, ordinary vans and existing roads into a reliable first world jitney service without the need for expensive infrastructure. DRT doesn’t sound too different than private taxis to me, though. Taxis around here charge $1.80 + 20 cents per each eleventh of a mile. Can Hancock beat that?

Anyway, I’m still stuck in town this weekend:

Whisky, wine and cheap perfume; all those crowded bars
and hotel rooms
Exotic rhythms to embrace
but everywhere is a lonely place
so down and down and down I go
but where I’m going, well I sure don’t know
But I can feel my restless mind
calling out for love at crying time

All this talk about reforming banks, creating green jobs and reviving the credit markets gives me a warm feeling about us rolling up our collective American sleeves and doing...something.  

But how will we know it's working? Lately, we've all been checking the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to see whether the people who got us into this mess in the first place approve of the proposed solutions. And that's just weird. But what to do?

I have a hunch that a crucial measurement should be in the arena of housing, where all this began. And it shouldn't be in housing sales, because unless the number of foreclosures drops, sales will just represent a downward spiral of forced bargain-basement selling. (A cellar of sellers, so to speak.) In fact, maybe the measurement should be of number of homeowners saved from foreclosure or numbers of upside-down loans stabilized--numbers which are shockingly low even after months of discussing the issue.

I was struck by the lukewarm response to Bertha Lewis' post on ACORN's activities to stop foreclosures.  As CEO of ACORN, Ms Lewis is surely the Warren Buffet of poor people.

I'm a little uncomfortable with direct action tactics myself, and I could take issue with ACORN's representation of the foreclosed as hapless victims of the man--which I think has unintentionally contributed to the misunderstanding that the foreclosed are either inept or malicious. But who's going to quibble about whether the person who issued the hurricane warning ought to have worn a red suit or a blue one: ACORN saw this problem coming a mile away and has consistently been on the homeowners' side with a view toward fixing it.

I'm glad to see ACORN and others seemingly scrap the "workout options" presented by the banks, which are proving ineffective, in favor of a more radical approach. It would be interesting to hear more from Ms. Lewis about whether that's what ACORN is doing, and to know whether it's possible to build a consensus around that more radical approach. Testing here at TPM would be useful.

In any case, a critical measurement for how we are doing will be how many homeowners (and perhaps even how many rental property owners!) are made whole and able to provide stable housing for ordinary people once again.

I'm pretty sure it's a number that none of the big players have dared to look at yet. It's up to all of us to demand that they do so, because our future depends on it. 

Un-freaking believable !

One of the biggest causes of the
financial crisis was that
Americans were borrowing (and
spending) more money than they
could afford to pay back.

So how are credit-card issuers
reacting to consumers' attempts
to live a more financially
responsible lifestyle? They're
threatening to cut their credit
cards off if they don't spend
enough.

Oh and me ?? I haven't had a credit card of any kind for
years.

C

Seems as though Cantor has no intention of being civil. So why the
hell show I reciprocate. Whats sauce for the goose as they say.

House GOP Leader Eric Cantor
(R-VA) has remained silent on
his office's profane response to
a coalition supporting working
people and job creation. Cantor
apparently directed his
spokesperson to apologize in his
stead. The apology was accepted
by AFSCME President Gerald
McEntee whose members the
profanity laced video was
ridiculing.

Talk about how not to win friends and influence people.


C

Hi there, come on in.  Good to see you, as always.  No, no, leave it open.  The screen door will keep the early spring bugs away even as it allows the breeze to clear out the cobwebs.  Are you cold?  All the windows are open, too.  Grab yourself a seat, I've got some throws around here somewhere, they'll help to take the chill off.  I know.  I'm really pushing the whole idea of letting the stuffiness slink away and having fresh air invade the cracks.  Who cares that it's February!  That alone makes a sixty-five degree southern evening something worth celebrating.  And let the wind blow the curtains and knock stuff over - I'll even help it with the bigger stuff.  Sorry!  Where are my manners ... what may I bring for you?  I've chilled wine and warm tea, cheese and crackers on the table.  There's a pot of vegetable beef soup on the stove, bowls and spoons handy, and some warm rolls in the oven.  I almost forgot about the pie you brought!  Sounds like a nice late night supper if anyone is hungry.

Read more »

This is so profoundly depressing.

As a special cultural event co-incident with the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, we are treated to a veritable blizzard of news so disturbing as to beggar belief.

Reading the instant report, purporting to show a 43-39 edge for Creationism over Evolution, the mind staggers and the senses reel.

Bad enough these people walk among us without tatoos on their foreheads indicating caution:empty; that they might cast votes is practically an act of political terrorism. (Scares the shit outta me...)

An urgent Constitutional Amendment: To Register to vote, you must swear that you understand that the world is not 4000 years old, and that you do not believe Raquel Welsh could really be *flown off by a Teradactyl,.

*even if the resulting shot up her fur bikini from the ground was worth the price of admission to 10,000 B.C.

...but that hasn't stopped most media outlets from referring to this episode as anything from a blow to a catastrophe for the Obama administration. Call me a political naif, but I don't see it. This makes Gregg look like an idiot, but otherwise it looks like once again Obama has extended the hand of bipartisanship and had it slapped away.

A couple caveats: I have no idea why Obama wanted Gregg in the first place. No one seemed able to explain why the guy who a few years ago voted to abolish the Commerce Department was the best pick to lead it. Also, Gregg's withdrawal is clearly bad news in the sense that the department is still without a leader, and it shows that Obama may have once again misjudged the magnanimity of a potential GOP partner.

But honestly - what was Gregg thinking? You take a job in the President's cabinet, and you get to argue your positions vigorously...but in the end, you carry out the President's directives.

It strikes me that Republicans have decided that bipartisanship means "The President has no principles." Inviting Republicans to the negotiating table on the stimulus, offering them tons of concessions (even when the American people have given Democrats overwhelming control of the entire government) - that's not bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is letting the Republicans write half the bill - or perhaps more. Inviting Republicans into his cabinet isn't bipartisanship. Bipartisanship is letting Republicans run their cabinet agencies according to their own ideology.

Personally, I see this Gregg episode as reflecting well on Obama. If Gregg thought he'd be able to do whatever he wanted at Commerce, then he thought he'd be able to run roughshod over a weak president, whose desire for bipartisanship trumps his principles. Obama balked, stood strong, and Gregg had to withdraw. I'm not by any means suggesting this is what Obama regularly does. I'm among those who thinks the concessions to the GOP have been overmuch at times, in terms of what's best for the country.

But in this case, it seems that's what Obama did. And I think it's great, not just because I prefer his views to Judd Gregg's, but because hopefully it signals that Obama is starting to recognize that bipartisanship - while still a great long-term goal which I hope he continues to work on - is not as important right now as delivering on the policy goals which the American people elected him to achieve.

In my last blog, I expressed a number of concerns regarding the soon to be signed stimulus bill. It tried to do too much, i.e.; it was muddled with too many parts not directly related to stimulus. And, it didn't do enough, i.e.; Obama's failure to frame it within an overarching vision. A clear, decisive vision that said to our nation, hey, I have a long range plan here. We're not simply going deeper into debt.I haven't heard those signals, not to my satisfaction, but I know, I know. You cannot make all of the people happy all of the time, and there's no way all of us were going to be in agreement on every part of this baby. I even found myself siding with the Republicans on a couple of points, but let's not be confused. I am unshakably in support of President Obama. He has all my heartfelt hopes. Here's a quote from FDR in confronting the Great Depression.

 

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all else, try something.

 

So, to turn a phrase, what a difference an administration makes. At least Obama is doing something. And it is a mark of not only his considerable skills but of his significant political capital, that he got something so monumental passed in so little time.

 

More so, barely three weeks into his presidency and I have already been provided with ample opportunities to be proud of the man. One was when he stepped up to the plate over the Daschle issue. "I screwed up." How refreshing was that? And his shrewd decision to do an interview with Al-Arabiya, addressing a need for olive branches that was part of my personal shot at an inaugural addresses a few blogs back. To take a trip in the way back machine, at the time of 9/11, we had maybe five thousand Muslims who were pissed off enough at us to fly a plane into one of our buildings. Bush tragically turned two billion Muslims against us. Now, in one deft stroke, Obama has gotten us back to facing a relative small handful of religious zealots.

 

Another moment, which made my heart swell, came Tuesday afternoon in Florida, and here I will prove myself a sentimentalist, but if anyone saw Henrietta Hughes and was not moved to get a little something in their eye, you never had childhood. Or a mother who loved you. You were probably raised by crocodiles.

 

Visions of my own hard-pressed mother came to mind, God rest her soul. To hear Henrietta's quivering voice, "...I'm so thankful for ya. I'm praying for ya everyday," all the other meek and struggling souls who now find themselves staring down the gun sights of personal ruin came to mind. And watching Obama moved by that woman's heartfelt plea, enough so that he was compelled to go over and give her a hug, well, we were all witness to the beginnings of a profound and long awaited healing process in this country.

 

Holy Jesus, someone cares. And just maybe we're all in this together.

 

Of course, in reading an article the next day in that Ft. Myer's online rag, news-press.com, and the subsequent comments made by some of its bloggers, you'd think the offer of a home to Henrietta by the wife of State Representative Nick Thompson was just another handout to those who didn't need or deserve one. The despicable comments made about Henrietta "looking as if she eats well enough" were a reminder that, no matter how uplifted I might feel by the change of tone in this land, there are some hardened and embittered souls who will never view this revived spirit of compassion in our country as anything but another sham.

 

In response, I hearken back to my first anthropology primer in college, struck at that time by evidence then being gleaned from bone remains found in prehistoric caves. Bones that showed signs of severe trauma, trauma that would have completely debilitated an individual and probably led to death, had not those bones been given a chance to heal, a fact suggesting that a tribe had cared for the weakest among their members, in what was surely one of the very first acts of our humanity. When Obama hugged Henrietta Hughes on Tuesday afternoon, and when he promptly instructed his staff to talk with her after the meeting, he was reaffirming a fundamental bedrock of our species. Perhaps we cannot fix every little bit of human suffering in this country today, or in this world, but by God, we can try. When we hear about it, we can at least try. And we can take every little opportunity in our own lives to reaffirm the oft ignored spirit from which we derive. We can show in the face of any hardship, we are truly a worldwide tribe that works together.

 

The bedrock of a healthy democracy remains dissent and a vigorous level of national debate, and I simply take issue with some of the decisions Obama has made, but I am indeed nibbling around the edges. The truth is, a great sense of peace came over me last January 20^th,, and it only grows with the passing of time. At last, I think every morning upon arising. At long last we are headed in the right direction. My heart swells up to such a point, I'm even ready to hug a Republican.

 

I'll take Judd Gregg at his word -- he turned down the Commerce Secretary post because he has fundamental disagreements with Obama, especially about the stimulus package but also about the way government should handle and regulate businesses going forward.

Here's the problem -- we have parties for a reason.  We should expect fundamental disagreements of this sort.  Gregg was at least honest enough to realize that if he couldn't follow the President's lead, he had to get out of the way.

But Obama was wrong to have appointed him in the first place.  I've never been happy with the bipartisan cabinet idea.  You can't tell me that there's not a Democrat more qualified for commerce than Gregg is, after all.  So why not go with that more qualified Democrat, whoever he or she is?

I'm less concerned by Robert Gates at defense since he seems to be willing to follow Obama's orders and because it makes sense to have some continuity at the Pentagon while we're waging two wars.  But even there, I'm less than satisfied.

Ideas matter.  Democrats are Democrats and Republicans are Republicans because our ideas differ.  At the moment, we Democrats need to implement our ideas.  Everyone in the administration needs to support that.

The line right now is that we're eschewing partisanship and ideology for "what works."  But "what works" is just a polite way of saying that we're going to pursue Democratic ideas because that's what works.  Republican ideas demonstrably don't work and indeed caused our current crisis.

That's not to say that Republicans can't or won't find a lot to like in our ideas.  I love the Republican commitment to personal freedom, for example, I just don't think they really implement it all that well.  They, in turn, might realize that Obama's stimulus plan has hundreds of billions in tax cuts, just targeted differently than Bush might have.

I do think that going forward we need to rely on members of our own party to pursue our party's ideas.  We should always be trying to convince the Republicans to see our ideas in the best light and we should always make minor concessions in exchange for support but shouldn't forget that there are two parties for good reason (well, there should be more parties but that's another discussion).

I'm persuaded by Andrew Sullivan on the Gregg withdrawal: it makes sense only as an act of partisan loyalty, which means in this case loyalty to partisans who have decided on a strategy of opposition and obstruction. The stimulus issue wasn't something that changed in the last few days; the census question is a canard.

But Gregg's stepping down is a losing move in a losing strategy. It's hard to see what Obama loses here, or what the Republicans (let alone Gregg) gain. Obama gets to appoint a Democrat and get full credit for bipartisanship anyway. The Republicans keep a Senate seat that they were going to keep for two years anyway, with no guarantees after that. And Gregg's vote won't change the stimulus package; losing 61-38 isn't different from losing 61-37. Gregg gets to be a minority Senator instead of Commerce Secretary, and if that were a better deal he would never have gone looking for a Cabinet gig.

There's been a lot of media spin about how well the Republicans are succeeding by being uncooperative, but I don't see it. Obama is getting to position himself as a cooperative bipartisan leader while the Republicans look like inflexible ingrates. (Taking a job from Obama and then quitting doesn't make Obama look bad.) And they end up cutting themselves out of the decisions. This isn't a strategy so much. It's more like a political suicide pact.

The ideas in this post are from my book, The Genesis of Values, which uses concepts in psychology to analyze political change.

I have been watching the constant struggle between liberals and conservatives for my entire adult life, with each side always working to remake America in its own image, trying and hoping to consign the other side to the dustbin of history.  Who will win?  Can we know?

Yes, we can know who will win.  The answer, I am certain, is that if America does not suffer a severe economic depression then it will become a European-style liberal society within thirty years.  This is, in fact, inevitable.  Surprisingly, the reasons flow not from any analysis of politics, but from evolutionary psychology. 

When people watch the attitudes and behavior of those whose values differ from theirs, they often think, 'How can they feel this way?'  The answer to this comes also from evolutionary psychology. 

I believe that evolution has given us emotions for a reason, and that reason is to impel (create an impulse toward) adaptive behavior.  Our emotions have been shaped by evolution to make us want to do things that aid in our survival and reproduction.  They are sensations that impel socially adaptive behavior, just as physical sensations like hunger or thirst impel physically adaptive behavior like eating and drinking. 

This includes the moral emotions, meaning those emotional reactions we feel when we perceive something as being morally 'right' or 'wrong'.  This strong sensation of rightness or wrongness feels like a direct perception of reality, but it isn't.  Seeing something as right or wrong is different from seeing the sky as blue on a clear day.  One is emotion, the other perception, and emotions concern what we want, not what is factually true. 

Obviously, people regard very different things as right or wrong, and are shocked when others don't share their perceptions.  It's as if the others can't see that the sky is blue.  This happens because evolution has programmed us to 'want' different things under different conditions. 

A standard argument in evolutionary psychology holds that humans engage in cooperative behavior because this increases resources available for survival.  Humans are therefore also endowed with 'cheating detectors' so that they can make sure others respond to cooperative behavior by reciprocating.   Without a cheating detector you could be generous to someone else and they could be selfish towards you, and your generosity would be bad for your survival.  With a cheating detector you punish people who do that, and they learn to reciprocate, or you stop dealing with them.  Voluntary exchange, and therefore all economic transactions, are made possible by cheating detectors. 

When your cheating detector goes off, you feel a sense of 'wrongness', and this sensation produces anger and an impulse to punish the person who is 'wrong'.  This helps you survive.  I believe that the same logic applies to things other than cheating.  I believe that evolution has endowed us with several 'wrongness' detectors adapted to different types of relationships. 

Humans increase their resources for survival whenever they coordinate their actions with others, and coordination can be cooperative or coercive.  This means that there are three modes of relating: cooperative, dominant, and submissive.  In each one people act in ways that are intended to elicit desired behavior in others, and they have a wrongness detector that goes off when they don't receive the response they want. 

Cooperation is intended to elicit cooperation from others.  When it is received the detector for cooperation detects rightness, when it isn't the detector detects wrongness.  This is the evolutionary basis for the egalitarian values of fairness and justice. 

The other modes of relating operate similarly.  Dominance is intended to elicit obedience.  When it is received the detector for dominance detects rightness, when it isn't the detector detects wrongness.  This is the evolutionary basis for the hierarchical values of obedience and respect for authority.  Submission is intended to elicit approval and protection from those who are dominant.  When this is received the detector for submission detects rightness, when it isn't the detector detects wrongness.  This reinforces the values of obedience and respect for authority, and is also the evolutionary basis for the human desire to worship a just and loving God.  (More on this in another post, but for now I will just note that the word 'Islam' is Arabic for 'submission'.)

These different modes of relating, and their detectors, are activated by the circumstances in which they are adaptive for survival.  Scarcity makes dominance more adaptive for survival, while abundance makes cooperation more adaptive for survival.  When individuals need to coordinate activity in order to obtain resources, the question is whether to cooperate or to try to dominate.  There are risks and benefits to both.  One risk is the risk of death or injury from conflict.  The other risk is insufficient resources for survival.  With an attempt to dominanate, the risk of harm in conflict is increased, because the other individual might fight back and injure or kill the aggressor.   With cooperation the primary risk is insufficient resources, because conflict is avoided. 

In times of scarcity the risk of dying from insufficient resources is very much increased.  Since this is the primary risk with cooperation, this means that scarcity makes cooperation more risky.  Thus dominance is relatively less risky in times of scarcity than in times of abundance.  The risk of being harmed in conflict stays the same during times of scarcity and times of abundance, while the risk of dying from insufficient resources declines as abundance increases.  This means that as abundance increases, cooperation becomes less and less risky, and so becomes the preferred evolutionary strategy more and more often.

What this means in practice is that when individuals of roughly equal capacities need to coordinate activity, the potential payoff of dominance in survival terms is much greater under conditions of scarcity.  Therefore conditions of scarcity should increase the number of situations in which dominance is perceived as advantageous, and so dominant, coercive, non-cooperative behavior should be higher under these conditions.  And when we look at societies around the world and throughout history, this is exactly the pattern that we see.  The correlation between scarcity and authoritarianism, while not perfect, is very high. 

What this tells us about politics, our own and in general, is that scarcity will cause increased activation of dominance and submission and the detectors that accompany those behaviors.  Therefore, the hierarchical values of obedience and automatic respect for authority will be stronger and more prevalent under conditions of scarcity.  Conversely, abundance will cause increased activation of cooperation and the detector that accompanies it.  Therefore, the egalitarian values of fairness and justice will be stronger and more prevalent under conditions of abundance. 

These ideas are original, and I call them coordination theory.  Coordination theory provides the mechanisms that explain the historical progression in the West from authoritarian systems such as monarchy, fascism, and communism, to modern liberal democracy.  It also explains why democracy seems to eventually become inevitable as economic affluence increases.   Additionally, coordination theory also explains political change over time within democracies, from conservative to liberal as affluence increases. 

Of course the correlation between economic advancement and political change is not perfect.  The reason for this is that much of the change is time-lagged.  Personality and consequently values are largely formed during childhood and adolescence, so much of the political effect of economic changes is not revealed until the generation that grew up during those changes reaches maturity.  This process is detailed in my previous post. 

The important thing about coordination theory is that it not only explains the past, it also predicts the future.  One prediction I made privately a few years ago was that Russia was due to enter a period of increased authoritarianism, due to conditions of increased scarcity that have prevailed there since 1990.  The generation raised under these conditions is now maturing, and the increase in authoritarianism there can already be seen.  My prediction now is that it will continue to increase significantly over the next few years, and this will constitute a major foreign policy challenge. 

I also predicted that America would see an increase in liberal tendencies after about 2002, when the generation born after the difficult times of the 1970s and early 1980s matured.  That prediction was too early by a few years, but still occurred.  My prediction for America now, as stated above, is that if decent economic conditions continue, we will become a European-style democracy within thirty years.  If coordination theory is correct, then that's pretty much inevitable.  Unfortunately, however, decent economic conditions can no longer be assumed.  

The next post will explain the evolutionary roots of empathy, entitlement, and hatred, and how these affect into political values, according to coordination theory.  

Just trying to find some motive for this crazy ass cop who's out to bust the nation's (WORLD'S) best swimmer for the crime of getting caught in a PHOTO smoking pot several WEEKS ago.

The effort to prosecute Phelps on what would be at most a minor drug charge seem extreme compared to similar cases, lawyers said, and have led some to question whether the sheriff is being overzealous because he's dealing with a celebrity.

Sheriff Leon Lott:

He rose from patrol officer to captain of the narcotics division in the early 1990s and was well-known in the county for wearing stylish suits like the drug agents on "Miami Vice" and driving a Porsche seized from a drug dealer.

I think the crazy Miami Vice sheriff wants a wack at whatever Phelps was driving to that party.  What about these poor bastards?

The case took a turn Thursday when lawyers for two people said their clients were among eight arrested last week and questioned at length about the November party near the University of South Carolina where Phelps was photographed smoking from a marijuana pipe.

Defense attorney Dick Harpootlian and fellow defense attorney Joseph MuCulloch said deputies searched at least two houses. The men told their lawyers the raids went down like a major drug bust, and 12 deputies burst into the home with guns drawn, pulling small amounts of marijuana from those arrested. Several computers and storage devices were also seized, Harpootlian said. (emph. mine)

Does anybody deserve to be treated like this?  In my humble opinion, we were (and maybe still are) only about half a step from just waterboarding everybody who was at that party to get to the bottom of this awful weed crime.  These guys probably only have to worry about replacing all the stuff the cops 'confiscated' from them and pay a bunch more money to the state, city or county that collects the fines they will receive.  Maybe they'll just get put in jail for a few years.  Yesterday, promising college students, today, five-to-ten for some bullshit weed crime.  It's as transparently asinine as those bogus WMD lies that Bush invented to advance his war lust and justify torturing a bunch of Iraqi's into testifying to their phantom locations.

The investigators appear to be trying to build a case against Phelps from others _ a tactic normally used to bring down drug dealers with a large amounts of cocaine or methamphetamine, not someone who smoked marijuana five months ago, said Chip Price, a Greenville attorney who has dealt with drug cases for 33 years.

"Never have I seen anything like this on a simple marijuana case," Price said.

Price was being coy.  This type of stuff happens ALL THE TIME.   Innocent people (and even the MAYORS DOG) get killed all the time. Whoops, that's just collateral damage of THE WAR.  Routine.  Probable cause?  With so many smoking pot, it's free reign on a pretty large percentage of the population.  Marijuana helps keeps you healthy, so it's pretty obvious it isn't going away.

The Michael Phelps case threatens to blow the lid off the stereotype that pot is for losers.  Winners Smoke Weed.  Pass it along.

Enjoy.

We need to move carefully in establishing a national electronic medical records database, since there really are serious problems as it stands now with healthcare records privacy. The fairly recent Privacy Rule (2006) established under The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), was touted as a measure that would protect patient records, but turned out to be no more than another GWB/Orwellian type measure - it sounds good, but then one discovers it has an effect that was the opposite of what it ostensibly was supposed to achieve.

In fact, not long after the HIPAA Privacy Rule went into effect, a coalition of medical providers sued HHS because of the more egregious but little-known provisions of HIPAA that, despite all the promises, actually provided less control by consumers over their personal medical data. Unfortunately, the decision was against the coalition, so the questionable rules remain.

Further, although HIPAA did establish some apparently stronger guidelines for records confidentiality, it gives patients no right to file a private lawsuit in order to challenge those who violate the confidentiality rules. Only the Secretary of HHS can sue. So in the years since HIPAA privacy was passed, there have been hardly any lawsuits for confidentiality breaches under HIPAA. Here's a recent article from a Healthcare IT website about the almost non-existant HIPAA enforcement.

So HIPAA appears to be a case legislative of bait and switch: a tedious process (all those forms that we have to fill out) deceives us into thinking that the records are protected, but in reality, many HIPAA protections are illusory, and the lack of enforcement by HHS means it's a law without teeth.

Patient confidentiality is a very serious issue. A study sometime before the HIPAA Privacy Rule was put into place found that around 3 out of 4 (that's 75%!) of medical consumers felt there had been breaches of their medical records. And even after the passage of HIPAA, studies revealed significant concern among medical consumers over records privacy. How much worse would this be if there were a centralized database? Who would have access to such a database? What specific information would it contain? What protections would be put in place to prevent unauthorized access? Would the consumer have access to their personal information, or only medical and governmental personnel? What procedures would there be for correcting errors in the record? Obviously, those with conditions that are subject to substantial social stigma, such as mental illness or HIV/AIDS have a much higher level of concern about how these questions may ultimately be answered, but anyone who visits a doctor has the right to expect effective safeguards of their privacy. So it's reasonable to raise serious questions about the new proposed database, especially in light of the many failures to protect patient info, even after HIPAA was passed. And the questions above are just a start; there are so many questions that need to be asked and answered before we, as citizens, sign off on something like this.

The idea of electronic records may be a very good one, when looked at primarily in terms of efficiency. We do need to find ways to reduce our ridiculously large medical expenditures. But there are potentially very serious problems with records privacy that need to be resolved first.

UPDATE: 2-13-09, 3:51pm PST
I am very happy to report that in researching this issue further, I happened upon additional new information that says the Congress included stronger medical records protection as part of the stimulus. And it looks like the medical records privacy issues made it through the conference committee, so we're almost there. Apparently, Congress wrote in a provision that establishes that advocacy groups will be participating in the regulatory process, a very good sign. (Initially Congress, in writing HIPAA, apparently intended for there to be strong privacy protections for medical records, but it was in the writing of the rules by HHS that things became watered down and dicey.)

Here's an excerpt from an article I found, written just today, on what's in the stimulus bill regarding medical records privacy protections:

Economic stimulus legislation awaiting final approval by Congress, then expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama, includes more stringent medical records privacy requirements along with $19 billion in funding for health information technology (IT).

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (H.R. 1) would provide grants and payment incentives for physicians, hospitals, nursing homes and other health care entities to adopt and make meaningful use of technology designed to create and manage electronic health records (EHRs).

The legislation also includes provisions intended to shore up public confidence in the use of EHRs and personal health records (PHRs) by beefing up enforcement of and expanding the scope of businesses covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) privacy and security rules.

HIPAA consultant John Parmigiani said Feb. 12 that he expects the health IT provisions in the economic recovery bill to have a "significant impact" on health care privacy and security.

Because it speaks to privacy and security breach notifications, increased enforcement, audit trails, encryption and "a definite concern for driving the attainment of an EHR while protecting patient information," he said, the legislation "emphasizes the critical ingredient in fostering widespread implementation, acceptance and use of e-health -- trust -- among patients, providers and payers to effectively and efficiently deliver health care and share health care information."

http://www.thompson.com/public/newsbrief.jsp?cat=HEALTHCARE&id=2058
 
I'm going to be keeping my fingers crossed...

I'm now thinking that conservatism is a form of schizophrenia. They can't make their mind whether they are socialists or monarchists. They vacillate between the two with nary a hit of irony. 

People lose jobs, get unemployment insurance for awhile.  Some try harder than others to find employment with and without success, and some take employment at less desired jobs.  There is no WPA etc., and it doesn't seem like that's on the horizon.

Can we put the unemployed to good use while they receive insurance payments?  Or are individuals and the niches which could be filled while nominally looking for work both too specialized?

The idea is to match up nominal "spare time" with nominally volunteer positions in charities and non-profits or government projects on a temporary basis. 

Class warfare is odd anathema for politicians in a democracy. Whenever a policy is suggested favoring - however slightly - anyone making less than, say, $100,000 a year, the proposal reflexively is stamped with that very term and shouted down in a frenzy implying real and present danger of frothing peasants storming torchlit citadel keeps to judge by hayfork and bill-hook well-meaning, good-hearted fatcats.

The fear of "class warfare" seems to flow uphill, to the more advantaged; not so much of it trickles down to the rest of us, who realize, as we eke out a living paycheck to paycheck, that class warfare is an ongoing part of the American economic system, always has been, and that the less fortunate are the exclusive collateral damage left in its atrocity and wreckage.

The underclass here, as everywhere, has the privilege of fighting - and dying - in this nation's wars, and starving through its "market corrections", as well as shouldering the burden paying for these sporadic misadventures. Add in your life's blood, and that's really what's meant by the inevitable "death and taxes" bargain of "making a living".

Read more »

As part of his initiative to make state government more efficient, New Jersey Governor, and former chief of Goldman Sachs, John Corzine is is looking to mandate competition for almost all goods and services that are purchases.

But, there is one exception, municipal bonds....You know, where companies like Goldman Sachs make an awful lot of money managing the sales of these instruments, and competitive bidding does save money:

Competitive bond offerings force banks to line up on an advertised day and submit the lowest interest-cost bid to win underwriting business. In a negotiated sale, states and cities decide in advance which banks will market the bonds. Underwriters have promoted the no-bid method, saying it allows them to get the best prices for issuers by tailoring the debt to specific types of investors.

Bid sales saved issuers 17 to 48 basis points, "on average and all else equal," according to a study published in the Winter 2008 issue of the Municipal Finance Journal. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point. On $100 million of debt, the savings mean $1.7 million to $4.8 million less interest over the life of a 10-year bond.

I guess that his buddies at Goldman Sachs are suffering under the restrictions Obama has placed on executive compensation.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.

Ralph Nader for Commerce Secretary.  He would be perfect for it and it would show the people that Obama is truly being inclusive in his cabinet.  Forget bipartisanship, Obama needs multi-partisanship. 

First posted at RACblog.

Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. Unfortunately, with a debate between evolution and intelligent design rife in our country, staggering new polling data finding only 4 in 10 Americans believe in evolution, and the ever-present push to teach creationism  in public schools, we can't quite call this the happiest of birthdays.

Read more »

Much of the world woke up yesterday morning to find that Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party had won 15 of 120 seats in the Knesset, overtaking the venerable Labor Party as Israel's third largest.  Those who cared enough, or were obsessed enough, to stay up late following the election returns found out the previous night.  The results have left journalists and diplomats scrambling to decide what it all means, which in a sad and sorry way puts me ahead of the game: I've been condemning Lieberman since 1999.

Read more »

In all the discussion about how to save the country from this terrible recession, I haven't seen a single actual idea surface for direct help to ordinary people (i.e. the recessed) as a means of stimulating demand or creating a trickle-up effect which would eventually restore the health of the financial markets. I do hear "Save the Credit Markets!" "Rejigger the Banks!" "Green Jobs!" "Lower CEO Pay!" "Rebuild Our Infrastructure" "Get the Dow to Rise Again!" It gives me a warm feeling about us rolling up our collective sleeves and doing...something.  

Why is this? It's all supposed to be about restoring public confidence, but has anyone asked the public what would make them feel more confident? When I talk with members of the public that I know, I hear: fear about housing values, pretty much everyone's only real source of security; fear about jobs, the other source of security; and as a distant third, Wall Street and the banks.

And yet, what's the first thing we all do when the puffs of smoke rise from Washington indicating that an idea has surfaced? We check the Dow Jones Industrial Average, to see whether the people who got us into this mess in the first place approve of the proposed solutions. Weird. Why do we do that?

Let's pretend for a moment that our representatives were elected by voters and not by corporations. What are the measuring tools we should use to determine whether the solutions are working for us? We can be patient--I mean, what choice do we have?--but it seems to me that we ought to be talking about how we the people will know when it's time to be more confident.

I have a hunch that one crucial measurement should be in the arena of housing, where all this began. And it shouldn't be in housing sales but in number of foreclosures, because unless the number of foreclosures drops, sales will just represent a downward spiral of forced bargain-basement selling. (A cellar of sellers, so to speak.) In fact, maybe the measurement should be of number of homeowners saved from foreclosure or numbers of upside-down loans stabilized--numbers which I suspect are shockingly low even after months of discussing the issue.

I was struck by the lukewarm response to Bertha Lewis' post on ACORN's activities to stop foreclosures.

As CEO of ACORN, Ms Lewis is surely the Warren Buffet of poor people. I'm a little uncomfortable with direct action tactics myself, and I could take issue with ACORN's representation of the foreclosed as hapless victims of the man--which I think has unintentionally contributed to the misunderstanding that the foreclosed are either inept or malicious. But at this point, that would sort of be like quibbling over whether the person who issued the hurricane warning ought to have worn a red suit or a blue one. ACORN is the only organization I know of that saw this problem coming a mile away and has consistently been on homeowners' side with a view toward fixing it.

I would like to see ACORN and others scrap the "workout options" presented by the banks, which have been revealed as ineffective, in favor of a more radical approach. It would be interesting to hear more from Ms. Lewis about whether that's what ACORN is doing, and to know whether it's possible to build a consensus around that more radical approach. Testing that here at TPM would be useful.

In any case, a critical measurement for how we are doing will be how many homeowners (and perhaps even how many rental property owners!) are made whole and able to provide stable housing for ordinary people once again.

I'm pretty sure it's a number that none of the big players have dared to look at yet. It's up to all of us to demand that they do so, because our future depends on it.