You are currently browsing the archive for the News category.
That’s what Naomi Wolf says. It sounds alarmist and paranoid, and in line with The End of America, but as creeped out as I already am by what I hear on the radio (e.g. ordinary Americans saying Wall Street should fail just because fat cats need to be blamed… ignorant of their dependence on an at least a minimally healthy financial system), I gotta wonder.
Do we want to move beyond Bush-Cheney-Rove? Or do we want four more years of that? There’s your choice, America.
There will be no debate between McCain and Obama tonight. Odds are there won’t be a debate between Palin and Biden, either. Because either one will burst the McCain/Palin bubble.
Just my hunches.
Now J.P. Morgan is the bank that ate the bank that ate my bank.
For what little it’s worth at this point, WaMu — Washington Mutual — was a bozo bank. What can you say about a bank that never got its online banking to work right? Plenty, but it’s too late to bother.
A press release and reassuring words from the Office of Thrift Supervision.
Who’s next?
Meanwhile, Rome burns.
Before. After. Best comment under the latter:
| Look, there are times when you put country ahead of party. The Republicans did it in 1974 when they told Nixon to get out. The Democrats did it in 1988 when they agreed to drop all the Iran Contra investigations in exchange for Howard Baker agreeing to clean up the mess as Reagan’s new chief of staff. Some Democrats (myself included) felt that Clinton should have resigned. |
| Now is a time for Republicans to accept an Obama/Biden presidency and resolve to fight to win seats back in 2010 and the Presidency back in 2012. Despite what the hysterics say, Obama is not a muslim, he is an American centrist on economic and foreign policy matters and center-left on social matters. Biden is the same. Both are competent consensus builders, and even if you don’t agree with their politics, both are the type of people who lead well in emergencies. McCain, perhaps due to an age-related condition, is now completely self-centered and random in behavior, even worse under stress, while Palin could seriously lead America to the apocalypse — she’s that dumb and crazy (in the extreme religious sense*). For the good of America, Republicans, find a way to lose gracefully this fall, regroup, and fight back with some serious leaders. This is what democracy is about. |
Actually, it’s about war. Makes much better television. Also mashups.
Anyway, like Jay said.
Bonus kink: The Ice President. Via Steve Garfield.
* My asterisk. Makes me think of here.
| Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? |
Maybe because we don’t need an incautious loudmouth as president?
I expected the McCain campaign to lie and distort as a matter of course, but (call me naive) I was hoping for better from the Obama campaign — not only because Obama started and stayed on the high road for the most part, but because so much of his support comes from grass roots supporters who have been energized by the prospects of positive change he has been promising from the beginning. No presidential campaign in history has done a better job of engaging voters as participants — especially as sources of funding — than Obama’s.
But now we’re in politics’ Mud Season, and Obama’s road is as low as McCain’s — or maybe even lower. When I look at FactCheck.org and PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter, I see Obama shifting strategies. Even if he’s still uttering the uplifting aspirational rhetoric that first nourished his grass roots, it now looks like he and Biden now hope to win by out-fibbing their opponents. For examples look here, here, here and here. If I were a source of Obama funding, I’d be pissed at how my money is being spent.
So I have an idea for a new campaign by the grass roots of the Obama campaign: cut him off until he stops treating the grass roots as a gas well.
Whaddaya think?
Sitting in a bar raised above the gambling floor at the MGM Grand, killing some fizzy water on ice while clearing time for my room to be cleaned. The bar is comfortable, with thick carpeting and heavy drapes pulled back to view rows of machines where patrons pour coins into slots. I haven’t heard the sound of coins pouring into trays yet. Do they still have that? I wouldn’t know. I hate to gamble on anything that’s not only stacked against me, but where I don’t control at least some of the odds. And I don’t get the thrill either. But hey, that’s me.
I also don’t get the appeal of cigarette smoke. I grew up at a time when smoking was standard. My father was a heavy smoker, and I’m sure our house and car stank of it, but I don’t remember. I do remember hating it, and vowing that I would never take up the habit. (And I never did.) Meanwhile I lived with it, as do all people in cultures such as this casino, where smoking is the rule rather than the exception. Back home in Boston and California, I live and work in places where smoking is exceptional, exiled to the outdoors or to “designated smoking areas”. That’s why I picked out my own little “designated nonsmoking area” in a corner of this bar, as far as I can get from other patrons, about half of which are either smoking or have packs and lighters parked next to their drinks.
I think in the long run smoking will become a fringe practice. Even in Europe and Asia, where smoking is still standard, the percentages of people who smoke will come down, both for the obvious reasons and because in the long run rationalizations tend to fail. Think of smoking as a bubble that will eventually burst and crash.
We’re only beginning to face the problems exposed by the failures of giant financial institutions such FreddieMac, FannieMae, Bear Stearns and AIG — and government bail-outs backed by the continuing ability to borrow from China and other creditor nations. Of which we used to be the biggest. Quite the opposite now.
If you’re looking for a far-sighted bubble-burster, Kevin Phillips is your man. He launched his career as a Senior Strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. There he led Nixon’s successful “southern strategy” and followed that with The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. In that book he not only predicted forty years of future, but named the Sun Belt as well. His latest book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, which Tim Rutten in the LA Times calls “a rhetorical shot across the bow of the current presidential campaign, which Phillips convincingly argues is failing to address the causes and implications of our current distress”.
Here he is on Chris Lydon’s Open Source program, on May 8 of this year:
| There’s a growing sense in the United States that the Imperial Era is over almost before it started. We’re seeing the weakness that is the United States allowing the financial sector to take over the private economy. That is now the largest portion: 21-22% of the GDP is finance, pushing manufacturing way down. I don’t think that the financial sector is responsible enough, safe enough, broad-minded enough to fill that position. I think what you’ll see happen to the United States is over-financialization: too much debt, too much over expansion and a degree of an implosion that will involve everything from too much debt and collapsing home prices to rising oil prices and the declining dollar. It’s all converging. It’s all trouble. It doesn’t spell the end of the United States, but it does spell the end of the United States as the Total Big Cheeze in the world. And we are going to lose some of the yardsticks that everybody enjoyed for a long time. |
About “financialization”, he says,
| You’re looking at the transformation of the American economy from one that produced things to one that moves money around. But it didn’t happen overnight. One of the major relationships is between the rise of debt and the rise of the debt culture. The debt culture meant rising deficits and “spend now and play and pay later”, the public’s debt tolerance to an extraordinary degree, and this general lackidasicalness of putting a framework around your culture and your economy — they’ve all sort of gone to seed together. And I think that the net outcome of this is a country that is in every way living beyond its means. We used to be the leading world creditor, the leading world manufacturer and the leading world producer of oil. Now we’re the world’s leading debtor, the largest inporter of manufatures and the world’s leading importer of oil. It’s a disastrous transformation. The only part of the economy that has profited is the financial sector, because an awful lot of the transition is toward more debt, more credit, more living on things you can’t afford, more keeping up pretenses, and more ambition around the world with less to back it up. And the consequenses of this in many ways is the George W. Bush administration. |
Not that Phillips thinks the Democrats are any better. About Paul Krugman, for example, he says,
| There is a good reason for Paul and the Democrats in general to be upbeat here. Maybe to an extent if things were a lot further advanced in the decay process, you could just flip a leaf and say all of a sudden that we are ferociously concerned about this decay. But they think that liberal policies and the Democratic approach can turn it around. Frankly, I don’t… The Democratic magic is more of the old razmatazz, and government will step in and there’s going to be a Green Deal as well as a New Deal, and we’re going to have five million new jobs for things relating to the Greening of America… The Democrats don’t want to admit that what they di8d for the most part in the two Clinton administrations was for the most part a continuation of the Reagan and first Bush administration — and then was continued and built upon by the second Bush administration. You had a lot of financial deregulation under the Clinton administrations. They repealed Glass-Stiegel, they deregulated credit cards, lots of stuff. They stepped on the gas in terms of private debt. The increase is extraordinary. So I can’t separate out the Clinton years from what preceded them and what came after them. And of course the Democrats need to be able to tell America in this election that … they have the answer. I understand that. But I don’t agree with it. |
As for Obama, he says “I don’t think he’s raised enough of these issues to have a mandate… They’re not acting now like people who understand that there’s a problem.”
He also adds, “That clearly goes for the Republicans. It’s hard to believe McCain. His economic program is almost a non-program.” That’s on top of George W. Bush: “I don’t want to do another number on George W. after American Dynasty, but he’s the wrong person at the wrong time andin the wrong place — and unqualified essentially for having been president of the United States during these eight years.
I could go on, but a bunch of smokers just parked at the tables on either side of me, and I’m sure my room is done now. Meanwhile, go check out that podcast.
| Newspapers and newspaper companies are about to die. The last remaining puddles of auto, home, job, and retail advertising are about to be sucked down the drain thanks to the economic crisis and credit is about to be crunched into dust. So any newspaper or news company that has been teetering will fall. If Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG can fall, so can a puny newspaper empire — and there’ll be no taxpayer bailout for them. When this happens, will it be Sam Zell’s fault? Hardly. |
| The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves... |
| Want to see who’s to blame for the state of your paper? Get a mirror. |
I’m not quite so pessimistic, although I agree about the direction of history’s vector. Meanwhile, in respect to this…
| When the internet came, did you all – every one of you as responsible, smart journalists, on your own – leap to get training in audio and video? Did you immediately hatch new ways to work collaboratively with the vast public of bloggers able and willing to join in local journalism? Not that I saw. |
… credit where due to the LATimes for hiring Tony Pierce to run the paper’s bloggig and blogging-outreach operation. It might be a matter of deck chair rearrangement, but at least it was one good move.
Just arrived at LAX, taking a few minutes before flying off to LAV (to which I would like to append oratory) to post a couple of pointers to what I read and heard on the plane.
First is A Conservative for Obama, by Wick Allison, who actually gave the maximum sum to McCain earlier this year, “…when there was still hope he might come to his senses”. A few grafs:
| Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good. |
| But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts — a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war — led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask. |
| Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth. |
| This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse. |
| …I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers. |
| Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened. |
The other is this interview with Tom Friedman on Fresh Air. I’m not sure he’ll succeed at making green “the new red, white & blue”, but if you don’t have enough reasons to vote against McCain already, he’ll load you up with a few more good ones.
