A quadrillion dollar deficit . . . just around the corner, folks!
Kinda like measuring the speed of light, only a lot more confusing.
His four year mission, to win reelection and boldly go where no one has gone before . .
I’m thinking the O-man will have to pull out a Vulcan mind meld with the nation at some point — come to think of it, he does have Spock like qualities.
I have Liddy and Congress on this afternoon in the background, in between writing spurts.
I have to admit, though I may be tarred and feathered for this, that I’m feeling pity for Liddy, after a particularly scathing examination by a Democrat whose name I didn’t catch, but has repeated about 40 times that he is “a contract attorney.”
The amount of posturing by our “public servants” all for the good of the “American people” is really underwhelming and grating at best.
On one level, these hearings are ludicrous . . . the inbreeding between big business and American government has been so deep for so many years now, it’s obscene.
But you wouldn’t think it to listen to these hearings.
The public servants arise anew, reborn for the good of We The People.
<yawn>
I get the public’s anger. I am one of those who understands that the money is one tenth of one percent that weighs in at 50 percent, given our current economic hardship.
The money is symbolic, gets to the heart of what most Americans live in everyday, the most invisible layer of culture, because unlike race and gender, its markers are elusive: class division, in a culture devoted to to denial through acquisition’s narcotic effects.
Making Liddy a scapegoat is just wrong; he jumped on the boat late in the game, and many in Congress are more than happy to crucify this man to make themselves look good. He’s no angel. But he’s no Devil, and Congress members ought not feed the hate for their own good.
And Liddy’s having to stand in for the incompetence, greed, and class entitlement of all the AIG executives, though his term there has been relatively short, a fact that many Congress members choose to ignore.
Very little moral high road here, in this viewer’s opinion.
Just more theater, on both sides of the aisle.
With a few exceptions, a self-serving debacle for our elected officials.
I lived the first twenty-one years of my life in the nation’s most populous state, and was no stranger to its subcultures.
I have never understood why the obsession with marijuana as a drug as opposed to alcohol has blinded vast swaths of the population, as though marijuana carries an intrinsic bogey evil eluding distilled spirits.
I think that bogey evil is called “ignorance.”
So now that hard economic times have fallen on California, some folks are suddenly weighing the economic benefits of legalization versus their own bizarre, shortsighted moral stance.
Shocking, isn’t it?
To think that economics might influence the depths of our morality, well that certainly takes the wind out of the sails of my idealism for today.
Years ago, the conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that all drugs should be legalized and taxed; I believe his argument ran (but please don’t quote me on this) that it was the most morally consistent position and that if people chose to use recreational drugs, well that was their decision. They should be free to make such a decision, no matter the demon. Most important, the government should be able to control and tax such substances, including heroin, just as alcohol was controlled and taxed.
Of course, at the time, all of this starkly contradicted Ronald Reagan’s “War On Drugs,” though the right had melded the two figures as inseparable ideological mastheads for the party. But Buckley recognized the futility of such government machinations on human behavior. Not surprisingly, the “War On Drugs” has proved to be a fiasco about as cost efficient and effective as our invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps if Reagan had listened to Buckley on this issue, and not just on the cold war issues of freedom, we’d have made progress on the biochemical and genetic markers for addiction predispositions with those tax dollars we’d have pocketed. Moreover, we’d have not thrown billions and billions down the toilet in some of the most futile spending of our government’s money, second only to Vietnam and Iraq in the past decades, or so it seems to this armchair observer.
After all these years of mostly failed drug policies–quite different from the alcohol bogey, which apparently isn’t a serious drug to these woefully well-intentioned folks–and the practical wisdom of letting people choose their own demons with which to live . . .
I try to steer clear of the obvious, and I give few of my life minutes to people like Limbaugh and his ilk.
But Timothy Egan’s piece in the Times today warrants this short entry. Mr. Egan makes excellent points that go beyond the usual diatribes against Limbaugh, and his column today is insightful and well written.
Two points which struck me, impressively written by Mr. Egan:
As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.
(bold face added)
We again see why Barack Obama is the man for this job at this time: we need leadership skilled enough to deflate those self-aggrandizing toxic hot air balloons that have floated too long over the land.
And it was this paragraph which I thought brilliantly summarized our current economic state of affairs, and crystallized reality as few have to date:
But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”
There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.
Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.
(bold face added)
Capitalism cannibalizing itself. Perhaps the most succinct summary of the global economic meltdown yet articulated.
The corrective will be a cannibal like swing to government regulation and nationalization, until the equilibrium is restored.
A draft or some such thing of the Federal Budget was released today, and I happened to have the boob tube on (allusion to its mind numbing effects, not the female anatomy, but the way the two are linked is striking, isn’t it?) this afternoon while rushing to get out the door.
CNN showed Ms. Pelosi holding the budget proposal in her hands and saying, “This budget reflects our national priorities and the President’s agenda . . .,” etc., etc., etc., the statement a swipe at what has been going on for the past eight years, and the past administration’s abandonment of American fundamentals.
Just a guess, but literacy and skill might serve We The People well.
Ya think?
Following Ms. Pelosi, John Boehner gets on flapping his lips about the deficit and the woeful and glib way the Democrats and the President are reacting to the budget deficit.
Excuse me?
The Republicans gave Bush a rubber stamp for eight years and basically racked up this mess, for the most part, in Iraq. Mission. Still. Not. Accomplished. Afghanistan is collapsing by the day. Meanwhile Halliburton went skipping off with billions and billions of dollars from its war profits (we love you Uncle Dick), and then moved to Dubai to avoid paying taxes. Not to mention the other contractors who made off with uncounted cartloads of American taxpayer money.
Now we have the housing bubble which came to full fruition under these good ol’ boys and their financial buddies, the credit card companies, the investment banks, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, et al, but hey, let’s just blame the new Democratic agenda and its task of trying to clean up the country while getting us back on track for the almost diminished notion of “the greater good.”
I am certain we all know the real solution to this problem:
“Tax cuts. Tax cuts. Tax cuts.”
Education won’t help.
Health care reform won’t help.
Infrastructure repair and creating jobs is a waste of time and money.
No, none of the above. Tax cuts. The cure to our ills.
If it weren’t so pitiful to watch, it would make for great comedy.
I am thinking to send Mr. Boehner my prayer beads from India, so he can count off how many times he chants the mantra during the day.
An ancient and revered custom, mantras and prayer beads.
Before the stimulus bill was agreed on in the Senate, I wrote the following Friday evening, with plans to post it late Saturday.
I hope that the Senate’s agreement is enough, given Mr. Krugman’s comments.
A fact that I thought smacking of more than a little irony (is it too soon after my previous entry to use the term?), was the Republican’s insistence on cutting Federal funding for school construction. In a snippet I saw on CNN last night, the Republicans argued that “building schools isn’t the Federal government’s job,” and some of the biggest cuts in the agreed on package came from this program.
I could be mistaken, but aren’t these usually the same folks who vigorously defend and promote the “Pledge of Allegiance” in the state built public schools?:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”
Just a guess . . .
For those who haven’t done so, I recommend reading Krugman, as a stimulus bill hasn’t passed yet, and this week may well be a tedious and exhausting circus for our public servants.
Yesterday, Harry Markopolos gave one of the most mind boggling testimonies that I’ve ever heard, bringing to light the deplorable incompetency of those working in the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mr. Markopolos warned the S.E.C. about Bernie Madoff as early as 2000, when the Ponzi scheme was in its early stages. Nobody at the S.E.C. paid attention. Madoff’s scheme subsequently became the single largest fraud in United States history, as most of us know by now, even if we’re trying to avoid reality’s drone these days.
On the surface, Mr. Markopolos is an everyday man who crunches numbers to provide for his family. A man who works hard for an honest living. Pays attention to the details. Gets the job done. Doesn’t let the obvious slip through the cracks. Doesn’t turn a blind eye to the reprehensible for the sake of ease. And he was willing to risk his life when the greater good called.
For all of the above, he gets my vote for Hero of the Week, if not the year.
Mr. Markopolos is someone from whom we can all learn. He did his job well and bravely, exemplifying sound intelligence and a humble work ethic. And he was fearless in hammering the idiots at the S.E.C. in front of House Financial Services Committee, with the little boys from the S.E.C sitting right behind him and having to suck it up as he publicly pummeled their ineptitude, complacency, and appallingly arrogant good time Charlie work ethic.
While too many buckle for fear of making waves, for personal security or gain, this man took them all to task without batting an eye, and while fearing for his life for over 5 years.
Kudos to Mr. Markopolos for his in your face, fact driven, apolitical testimony.
He will be giving information on another Ponzi scheme later this week.
It goes without saying that Mr. Rich is more nuanced and thorough than yours truly. And, of course, he eschews the “creative phraseology” that I relied on.
His must read essay persuasively defends President Obama’s less than enthusiastically embraced Inaugural address. In so doing, he portrays a Republic in need of psychic repair as much as economic recovery.
On the subject of defending the Inaugural address, Stanley Fish’s column this week adroitly examines Obama’s rhetoric in Barack Obama’s Prose Style. Another good read, informative and engaging.
Richard S. Fuld, Jr. appeared before Congress this morning, and, to put it delicately, fell all over himself. His appearance coincided with the Dow’s 800 plus point dip this morning, the first day that the market fell below 10,000 in four years.
Fuld, some of you may remember, was awarded the “Michael Eisner Award for corporate rapacity and poor corporate governance” by Nicholas Kristof in his column Need A Job? $17,000 an Hour, No Success Required.
I wrote elsewhere last week, that I think Fuld and others should be rounded up and corralled in a pen somewhere on Wall Street, and let the masses have at them. Well, I am advocate of non-violent action, and I doubt that will happen, but there is still a need for accountability and a semblance of justice. I suggested rotten eggs and overripe tomatoes to obtain a kind of national catharsis–but in light of today’s testimony that’s a bit optimistic.
The parading of Wall Street greed over the next months will not yield “justice,” but as I also wrote, I think these individuals might be well served by changing their identities ASAP. On second thought, the American public may simply be placated by the televised blame and shame.
If so, that is bad for America.
The more things change, the more they stay the same:
