Bailout Vote Breakdown

The NYT has a nice graphic.

Preznit Economypants

Steve Benen:

* As of today, the Dow Jones is lower now than it was the day Bush took office in 2001.

I'm not a fan of using the DJIA as a measurement for success, personally, as it doesn't include quality of life, or, you know, the majority of Americans, but damn. By his own standard (remember the CEO President? How's that working out?), Bush is a miserable failure.

... the DJIA on:

January 3rd, 1992: 3,201.48
October 14th, 1996: 6,010.00
January 14th, 2000: 11,722.98

Today, September 29th, 2008: 10,365.45

Oops

From the WSJ:

In what is by far the largest bank failure in U.S. history, federal regulators seized Washington Mutual Inc. and struck a deal to sell the bulk of its operations to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

And to think, the nice man who I had to talk to get my money out of WaMu last week assured me that nothing was wrong.

Capitalism! Fuck yeah!

Shakedown

Billmon:

Even the deepest purse has a bottom, and the point may be approaching where the costs of propping up the world's largest debtor nation (i.e. us) begins to outweigh the benefits.

The national debt is owed, in no small part, to banks in other countries. What would happen if the rest of the world - or even, say, the Chinese - decided they wanted their money back?

I'd make a crack about structural adjustment programs, but the Republicans already pursue those with vigor.

Monday

BuyMyShitPile.com. Awesome.

Literally no one in America thinks the economy is getting better. (See the the third table down.) Also, Bush's approval rating is down to 19% - and yet, I still predict the Democrats will capitulate and bail out a bunch of financial institutions that f*cked up with no meaningful oversight and no guarantee of future good behavior.

As Atrios says: Capitalism! Fuck Yeah!

Short Timeline of US Government Bailouts

Via Majikthise and from Pro Publica. Check it out (no excerpt because it's a table).

Preznit takin your turkee

When I said this:

This is also, in a way, the continuation of one way of reading neoliberalism: The privatization of profit and the publicization of risk. Only in this case, it's being done in the open - the risk is being publicized (that is, the bill is being footed by taxpayers) after things went bad.

I didn't think it would be taken so literally:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets.

...

A $700 billion expenditure on distressed mortgage-related assets would be roughly what the country has spent so far in direct costs on the Iraq war and more than the Pentagon’s total yearly budget appropriation. Divided across the population, it would amount to more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

All those political philosophy classes I took seem more relevant than ever right about now. Sadly, this is depressing, not exciting.

So I'll say to Bush what I refrained from saying to Hering yesterday: Fuck you.

... if the Dems fold/cave/go along on this one, there's no doubt I'm fucking voting for McKinney. This is insane.


Also, Atrios retains his ability to spell it out like no one else can:

Again, the problem is that lots of bad loans were made, lots of people made highly leveraged investments in those bad loans, and still more people bet on those loans by insuring them. The loans are bad. The mortgages are not going to be repaid in full. Housing prices are not going to magically shoot up 50% over the next 6 months. People gambled and lost and now the Democrats are racing to bail them all out.

In case that I'm not being clear enough, what's happening is that the US government just proposed giving $700 billion to a bunch of companies that knowingly made bad deals. Crony capitalism doesn't even begin to describe it.

UPDATE: Atrios finds this bit in the text of the act submitted to Congress authorizing the spending:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Why anyone in their right mind is going to do anything but kick the ass of the folks who submitted this is beyond me. Nevertheless, I predict that Democrats will take this 'bill' seriously.

"The Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression"

Nouriel Roubini:

# This is by far the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, not as severe as the Great Depression but second only to it.
# At the end of the day this financial crisis will imply credit losses of at least $1 trillion and more likely $2 trillion. The financial and banking crisis will be severe and last several years leading to a severe and persistent liquidity and credit crunch.

There are dozens more statements just like that, most with documentation backing them up. Roubini spins a very depressing scenario, but not a surprising one. What do you think happens when greed is held up as a value, regulations are shredded, and a Bush is in the White House?

The stupid burns like toxic chemicals on my skin

Hering:

If you look for a good reason to ban field burning in three years, you will look in vain. There is none.

Given the news and editorial coverage of this issue in the past, it's clear that Hering simply doesn't believe that concerns involving the environment or people's health are "good reasons." There's really no other way to explain this, since both issues have been in the DH this summer.

It would have been nice had he noted and rebutted the two obvious reasons, however.

The real gem, though, is this:

Through its laws, Oregon insists that farmland be used for nothing else. That implies an obligation to let farmers do their work the best way they know how.

This is, to put it mildly, stupid. If that was the case, farmers would have long since polluted the air and ground with nasty chemicals and through burning. One specific industry is not going to miraculously self-regulate themselves when it comes to the environment, especially not grass seed farmers (sorry, former bosses!). Why does Hering think field burning was reduced? What about developing less toxic fertilizers and pesticides? I can pretty much guarantee the industry didn't just decide to stop for the good of others - they were forced to bear costs they had previously externalized (namely, pollution) by a public agency tasked with looking out for the good of everyone, most likely the state.

The other implication - that only farmers know what works best for farmers - is equally stupid. Like no former farmer has ever worked for the state, or gone through the same educational programs?

If Hering is really upset about the low level of discourse in this country, maybe he should look in the fucking mirror some time. He's certainly not setting the bar any higher.

Dirty Motherfuckers

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis

Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 4 May 2008

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

[Whiteside Theatre] An Interesting Comment From a Regal Tool

I'm a little behind on blogging, so this story isn't exactly new, but I wanted to highlight something.

The background: A local group is trying to put together a bid to buy the Whiteside Theatre in Corvallis with the intent to remake into "performance space."

I have no issues with that, though I trust Darkside owner Paul Turner's word that it's going to be a very expensive operation.

I do have issues with this:

The sale would include a restriction against showing any first-run movies to avoid competition with Regal’s four-screen cineplex across town.

“The intent is to not allow the downtown theater to play the same movies that are playing at the Ninth Street theater,” Nunley said.

I call bullshit, but at least Nunley is upfront about it.

I know Regal and Carmike have an agreement that stipulates that they won't both show the same movie in Corvallis, and I think that's bad enough (actually, I think it's pretty frackin' horrible since it has allowed Regal to let their theatre turn into a giant dump). For Regal to want a similar noncompete clause as part of any sale is insulting and undemocratic... and I'm not much of a supporter of the market or private property rights, but this undercuts both. It's monopolistic and infringes on the right of the new owner of the Whiteside to do what they will with the building.

I wonder if this sort of thing has been held up as legal in a court of law?

The Human Cost of Our Insurance Industry

The family is suing:

Nataline had been battling leukemia and received a bone marrow transplant from her brother. She developed a complication that caused her liver to fail.

Doctors at UCLA determined she needed a transplant and sent a letter to Cigna Corp.’s Cigna HealthCare on Dec. 11. The Philadelphia-based health insurance company denied payment for the transplant, saying the procedure was experimental and outside the scope of coverage.

The insurer reversed the decision Thursday as about 150 teenagers and nurses rallied outside of its office. But Nataline died hours later.

That the doctor even needs to send a letter to the insurance company to ask is wrong - and yes, I know it's common.

It suggests that the priority is not health care but profits.

Again, I know this is not necessarily news. But it's still bullshit.

Consumerism and Commercialism in Schools

I wholly agree with this post; just go read it (also, it explains why I despise Channel One.)

An excerpt:

My concerns with the commercialization of childhood have to do with the damage done to kids by socializing them to be not only consumers, but consumerist, to define themselves and others by what the clothes they wear, the cache of their cell phone, the bag they carry, the gaming system they have, the sneakers they own, and/or their MP3 player, instead of their talents, interests, behaviors, and insights.

Before reading Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy, I thought this made them shallow and spoiled. I thought it created disturbing parameters of social exclusion. I thought it made a lot of work for parents. I thought it was used to promote lousy brands that harm kids rather than help them. All true.

But reading Schor showed me three things that made me go crazy:

1. that involvement in consumer culture actually causes emotional and mental health problems for children - depression, anxiety, low-self-esteem, psychosomatic problems.

2. that advertisers explicitly use techniques that undermine parental and teacher authority, to ally themselves with children. The adults in your life are controlling morons, but fruit by the foot understands you. Think about the consequences of this — sure, brand loyalty, but more broadly, if your parents are clueless dorks why should a child look to them for guidance or insight? Why should they share their most deeply held concerns? If teachers are oppressive and stupid, then, by implication, so is school. Not good.

3. that marketing, the vehicle that pulls children into consumer culture most directly is everywhere. Parents make the mistake of thinking that our children experience the advertising that they experienced. Not even close. Take the advertising you knew, up it’s emotional pull by adding insights from neuromarketing and ethnographic market research, put it on steroids, and then insert it everywhere from schools, to church, to friendships, to media, to conversations with “friends” in chat rooms, to youth clubs, to public effing space. Yes, yes, I’ve said this before.

I have encountered #2 all of these in spades at LHS. It's incredibly depressing.

Like I said, read.

The Kids Aren't Alright

Thomas Friedman today, in a New York Times column that's certainly making the rounds, talks about what he thinks is the tendency of kids today to be disengaged from politics.

Let me add a caveat in here at the beginning: I think Thomas Friedman is a complete and total idiot. From his being a huge Iraq War supporter to his unabashed adoration of globalization, he and I are almost never on the same page.

But that's not why I think he's an idiot. I think he's an idiot because he has this annoying tendency to use non-representative examples to support shallow, poorly-researched and often-wrong points. And I think he's a myopic narcissist. Worse than me, even.

Anyway. Back to the column at hand. Friedman is blathering today about what he calls Generation Q, the Quiet Generation. This is his label for today's students and youth, and he bequeathes it because he doesn't see students making their presence felt in the political realm. How has Tommy learned about this new generation? He's visited three colleges in the south. Wow. I'm impressed - it's almost like he's using an anecdote as the basis for a generalization about a whole generation. Sigh.

Friedman:

[C]ollege students today are not only going abroad to study in record numbers, but they are also going abroad to build homes for the poor in El Salvador in record numbers or volunteering at AIDS clinics in record numbers. Not only has terrorism not deterred them from traveling, they are rolling up their sleeves and diving in deeper than ever.

OK. Let's get the terrorism thing out of the way as soon as possible. Many - and I suspect it's actually most - folks around college-age don't see terrorism as a big threat to our daily lives, or as a deterrent from doing what we think needs to be done or want to do. Certainly we didn't buy into the 9/11 hype near as much as Friedman did (it only changed everything because the 'adults' shit themselves with fear and/or joy and then went about changing everything), but he is apparently unable to realize that other folks might not hold the same view of the world he does. In other words, I don't see a fear of terrorism as a significantly motivating factor in the behavioral choices of the group Friedman is talking about. There's no evidence for it.

Friedman then goes on to show how amazed he is that us young people are not hopping mad about the state of the country:

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

This is an interesting point, and I think there is some truth to it. Stephen Colbert certainly touches on it in this clip, and I agree that online activism is not substitute for organizing in the real world... and yet, somehow, Tom Friedman has zero credibility to be telling me this. Maybe it's because of crap like this. Or maybe it's because Tom Friedman spent years arguing that the Iraq War was necessary and just before doing an about-face and never really admitting his own role in hyping the war. I know that hearing such garbage from the pundit class - of which he is practically a charter member - over and over and over without nary a representative from the anti-war coalition on my television and radio from 2002 to this day certainly helped me disengage from traditional politics; if my point of view is never represented, why should I try and engage with the organization or medium that can't ever seem to get it right?

This is Friedman's solution:

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Um, Tom? You might have done more to kill that possibility than almost any single other person on the face of the planet (with the possible exception of the other amateur sociologist on the NYT opinion page, David Brooks). And besides that, there's the whole systemic repression thing - you know, how capitalism teaches kids from a young age that standing up and throwing one's lot in on the side of justice is silly when you could just be shopping? You know, that same capitalism that you spend a large portion of your time promoting? Didn't think so.

Not only that, but Friedman? FUCK YOU for suggesting "that's what twentysomethings are for" - to light a fire under the rest of the country. Thanks for using a brush so broad that it manages to assign one role to an entire generation of highly diverse people. That's not insulting or anything, nor could it ever remove our agency. And you wonder why we're not engaged? Seriously?

So, then, why is it that so many young folks are avoiding mainstream politics and traditional approaches? Maybe we've realized they don't work when the only two major parties are beholden to corporations and not constituents - or maybe it's that avenues of meaningful expression, public spaces, autonomy, and political power have been systematically removed from the reach of adolescents and young adults (well, from everybody, actually, but especially from people under 25).

Incidentally, I just finished Donna Gaines' book Teenage Wasteland today, and while it was written in the early 1990s about the so-called burnouts and burnout culture, Gaines makes a similar point: that alternative cultures develop because people, especially youth, don't see a place for themselves in the mainstream. Said youth feel marginalized, ignored, and insulted by adults who expect them to be good workers but don't want to allow for their creative expression. Even though this book 15 years old, I think her central assertion is relevant today - the main difference being that the advent of the Internet is now providing the space for kids and adolescents to express themselves (with all the attendant consequences and limitations) as opposed to the parking lot of the local 7-11. In both cases, however, 'adults' (and I am indeed conflating parents and people in charge) serve to push folks to the margins in search of meaning and autonomy.

This column by Friedman displays a very shallow level of analysis, like pretty much all of the rest of his work. I wish someone on the Times editorial board would notice.



Other folks have opinions too...let's excerpt/steal some of them.

Brian Beutler weighs in on the column:

It's easy to pin the sedateness of American youth on the absence of a draft, but I really don't think that has a whole lot to do with it. It seems to me that in the past 40 years, the incentives young people had to protest have been all but erased. The consequences of an arrest are much larger, the value placed on scholastic and professional achievement much higher, and the costs of delay much greater now than they were in 1968. It's my view that this is all the fault--indeed the master plan!--of conservative people. I'm just not sure I can explain why, and if I could, I'd write a book about it.

Ezra Klein points the finger at the media:

The other reason kids don't protest anymore is that they don't think protesting works. And they don't think it works because when they hold massive protests, the media doesn't give their argument a fair hearing, but instead mocks and marginalizes them, and picks out the most extreme participants in order to discredit the whole. On all this, the kids are right. But even I never thought that folks like Tom Friedman -- who was complicit, if not causal, in the media atmosphere that ignored the Iraq War protests -- would then lambaste them for laziness, or cowardice.

From my friend C (in an email, so no link):

This time, he calls us too quiet for our own good. Well, perhaps if the corporate media machine that he sits at the controls of actually covered some of the heroic protests, acts, and optimistic endeavors that this generation is engaged in, we would have a voice and platform. So, Mr. Friedman, instead of wasting your column's space by chiding us for being too quiet, how about you get your researchers off their lazy asses and spend some time profiling people who are taking on the greediest generation. It looks like you just couldn't get the story together. How about people protesting the Jena 6, or the Middlebury students organizing Step it UP! with Bill McKibben. Fuck you.

The Shock Doctrine

This short film is based on a new Naomi Klein book.

I won't lie - it's sort of horrifying. Watch it.

David Brooks on Sal Paradise

I have to admit I'm a little surprised to see David Brooks writing about Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

I'm less surprised by what he has to say:

In the Times review that launched the book, Gilbert Millstein raved that “On the Road” was a frenzied search for affirmation, a book that rejected the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the Lost Generation. The heroes of the book savored everything, enjoyed everything, took pleasure in everything.

...

“On the Road” turned 50 last month, and over the past few weeks a line of critics have taken another look at the book, and this time their descriptions of it, whether they like it or not, are very different.

“Above all else, the story is about loss,” George Mouratidis, one of the editors of a new edition, told The Age in Melbourne.

“It’s a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to — the famous search for ‘IT,’ a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found,” wrote Meghan O’Rourke in Slate.

Fair enough, though I suspect that the folks who are reviewing the book now are not oblivious to the frantic energy that pervades its pages. Instead, I suspect, they are trying to add something new to the discussion about Kerouac.

Then Brook says this:

If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troop that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.

The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.

Somehow, Brooks manages to shift into another vague complaint about modern culture.

I agree with Brooks, though, at least a little bit. And it pains me to say that, because I don't like most of his writing. But I do think he's got a point, though maybe not the point he was intending to make.

I think Brooks paints the modern Kerouac as what he see as a liberal/yuppie type - but I don't think the analogy to Kerouac holds, since Kerouac wasn't even a stereotypical 60's radical. He certainly wasn't a stereotypical 50's conservative, either, but I don't think one can conflate the Beat movement with the 60's counterculture movement in the way that Brooks is implying here. In fact, I wouldn't call Kerouac a "liberal" in the sense that he held as a priority anti-racism or anti-sexism. (C'mon, have you read On the Road? It's pretty male-centered.) I would call Kerouac a Beat, or a free thinker, or something, but not a liberal,and certainly not in the sense Brooks is implying with his caricature.

If there is a reason that Kerouac cannot exist today - because that's what Brooks is arguing - then it's certainly not some liberal hippie bullcrap. Instead, I think it's the totalizing nature of capitalism. A Jack Kerouac today would have immense trouble existing in any meaningful way outside the grasp of modern commercialism - a commercialism fueled by capitalism. The head space that Kerouac took advantage of, the cracks he threw himself into at full speed - those are much harder to come by today. It's much harder to disengage with the master narratives and really develop one's own at this point.

There very well might be a Kerouac sitting in a hovel in New York right now, typing furiously away. She might have already written a "moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey," but I have my doubts that anything like that will get a grip on anything like mainstream society. No, I think that sort of writing, and adventure, happens at the margins, in places that Brooks - and I, really - don't tread.



UPDATE: There is also this passage from Brooks that I forgot to make fun of:

But reading through the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation is going through at that moment.

I guess Brooks' voice is universal then. I'm sure he's never changed his mind about something based on new information or a new perspective on life.

David Brooks, the universal moral constant.

Unearned privilege sure does funny things to people.

The Stupid, It Burns

Via Afro-netizen, an NYT story about paying students to take and perform well on standardized tests:

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

I have nothing to say besides that this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and it's wrong to boot. Blech all around.

Talk about just applying capitalist values to everything.

A Dystopian Vision

H.E. over at The Enlightenment Project does something I've been wanting to see for a long time - they illustrates a scenario in which big business gets its way and rules the world.

Needless to say, it's not pretty, nor does the world last long:

The whole earth will be an engine for producing ever more wealth, on an endless upward spiral of more consumption and more work, until the earth is depleted and we are used up. The slag heaps will rise--human waste will accumulate: huddled masses of unproductive individuals who are burnt out and used up. But even the least productive citizens will be put to use as inmates, products of a growing privately-run prison industry on contract from the caretaker state, providing jobs for legions of guards, cafeteria ladies and other service workers, and handsome profits for stockholders.

About the only thing I think was left out is that morality will be super-repressive, as it would be based on a very specific reading of the Bible, and that trangressions would be punished severely. That means no abortion, no birth control, hell, no public acceptance or acknowledgment of the LGBT community, etc. etc.

Ah, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, taken to a very gruesome (but logical) end. H.E. does offer a succinct description of what's happening in the United States in terms of production and consumption:

This is, on a grossly inflated scale, the life most humans have lived until very recently in history: eat to work and work to eat--the endless cycle consumption and toil. It was only after the Industrial Revolution succeeded that a significant number of people could get off the treadmill, and buy time to enjoy themselves--to consume, and produce Culture in the old elitist sense: poetry, music and art for art's sake, literature, philosophy, crafts and pure science, the whole end and purpose of life. Now we're being told to get back on the treadmill and go even faster. Work harder and longer to produce more and consume more. If we achieved so much through those generations devoted to production and consumption, think of how much more we could produce and consume if we eliminated that unproductive leisure time, got back on the treadmill and devoted all our time and energy to production.

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, indeed.


UPDATE: In a roundabout way, that second quote starts to get at why I don't like work.

My Heart Can Only Shatter Once Per Day

...and this is what caused it to fall into little pieces today.

From a dissenting opinion:

After closing arguments, the court found that it was in Simone D.’s best interest to administer ECT even though it acknowledged that she would probably never “get better” [italics added]: “she perhaps could die. Perhaps she wants to die. But that’s not for us to determine. We must prevent her from dying.”

To sum up:

1) Women are subject to electroschock therapy 2x-3x as often as men.

2) ECT doctors are 95% men; patients are 70% women.

3) The women in the story doesn't speak English.

I call white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal bullshit.