Anger: Among financially prudent Americans who are pissed at the government bail-out other Americans are getting for accepting mortgages they couldn’t afford.
Well I’m not angry, and I think I qualify as prudent. I bought my little Baltimore rowhouse in 2001 and it was way less house then I could "theoretically" afford, but I wanted something I could pay the monthly mortgage on with a week’s take-home pay. It was my first house ever, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a lot of debt over it. Debt makes me nervous. And I wanted to have plenty of financial breathing room to afford the maintenance costs I knew would be coming with home ownership. Like the seven grand worth of new furnace I had to put in a couple winters ago. The purchase price on my house was just under ninety grand, and since then, its "theoretically" gone up in value to just around two-hundred and fifty grand. So my house could loose over half of its "theoretical" value and it would still be worth more then what I have left to pay on the mortgage.
So I think I qualify as prudent. But I was also lucky in some ways. I bought before the price of housing began to skyrocket here in Baltimore…when for a while there was affordable housing near the place where I work. If that hadn’t been the case I’d have had to either keep on renting, for every increasing rents as the price of housing around here went up, or I’d have had to find a place to live further out of the city and commute. And the prices in the outer suburbs were starting to go up, even back then. Before I got work at Space Telescope, I rented a one bedroom apartment in the suburbs and I watched my rent rise from just under four-hundred a month back in 1993, to close to a thousand a month before I bought my house in 2001. What do you do when the price of housing just keeps going up and up and up, even in the outer suburbs? What do you do if you have a family and kids? I was, and am, a single gay guy. It’s not terribly hard for me to get a decent place to live at the low end of the cost scale. If I needed space for a family, I’d have been constantly worried to death about the rising prices.
So if someone came along and said they could get me into a house, even at today’s prices, with some of that new high-tech free-market creative financing stuff…my second thoughts might get snuffed out in the gnawing fear that if I didn’t jump on it now, right now, I might get left behind while home prices soar into outer space, so far beyond my reach I might as well resign myself and my family to living in slums and still not having enough to pay the rent. Especially when they sit me down and wave a bunch of numbers in my face telling me that even though it looks like I can’t afford this house, I really can because the trend is that in a few years the house’s value will have doubled and I’ll be able to refinance easily then, before the balloon payment comes due. Pay no attention to that crushing monthly payment behind the curtain…
If you want to point your finger at anyone in all this, point it at the jackasses who, for purely ideological reasons having little to do with the reality of how human beings behave, worked diligently to construct what is essentially a shadow banking system that could exist with nearly no governmental oversight, figured it would self regulate because free markets naturally self regulate to the best possible outcome, and then watched mutely as it evolved into a system of borrowing, wherein the people selling the loans, didn’t have to bear the burden of financing them. Oh who could have predicted that a bunch of people lending other people’s money for a tidy profit of their own, regardless of whether or not the loans went bad, would make so many bad loans? Oh who could have predicted that injecting so much easy credit into a market with so much demand for so limited goods would drive the price of those goods into outer space? Oh who could have predicted that the people making all those bad loans would view those rising prices as a way to make even more money making even more bad loans?
And once again, an unregulated market drives itself off a cliff, taking with it hundreds of thousands of hard working families. This is the Savings and Loan collapse of 1988 writ large. And…surprise, surprise…the current little unpleasantness is brought to us by the same people who gave us that other little unpleasantness. I guess the 1988 Savings and Loan fiasco was just practice, because I don’t think that one sacred Wall Street like this one is scaring Wall Street.
A mysterious group calling itself Iowans for Some Semblance of Christian Decency has begun waging a campaign against former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, insinuating that not only is the Republican presidential candidate not a true conservative, he’s not a real Christian.
In fliers put under the doors of reporters at the Marriott in Des Moines, where Huckabee was staying Monday night, the organization, whose members are unknown, lays out its interpretation of how the former Baptist minister’s views run contrary to the Bible.
Huckabee’s support of educational opportunities for the children of illegal immigrants is portrayed, for instance, as "justification for violating the 8th commandment (stealing from U.S. citizens)." A lighthearted video clip where he pretends to talk to the Lord (watch HERE) is portrayed as "sacrilegious mocking of God for political gain."
From this cesspool the republicans will pick their presidential candidate. The one who wins will be the one that floats to the top.
A life of private jets and black-tie balls ended with Seth Tobias, a wealthy investment manager and a familiar presence on CNBC, floating face down in the swimming pool of his mansion here…
Mr. Tobias, who was 44 years old, had apparently suffered a heart attack, his brother Spence said at the time. The police did not consider his death suspicious.
But now an unfolding drama over Mr. Tobias’s estate is providing a lurid account of fast money and faster living in the volatile world of hedge funds. Mr. Tobias’s four brothers and Mrs. Tobias are locked in a legal battle over the estate, which is worth at least $25 million. And, in a civil complaint, they have gone so far as to accuse her of murder.
The brothers, Samuel, Spence, Scott and Joshua, claim Mrs. Tobias drugged her husband and lured him into the pool. Bill Ash, a former assistant to Mr. Tobias, said he had told the police that Mrs. Tobias confessed to him that she had cajoled her husband into the water while he was on a cocaine binge with a promise of sex with a male go-go dancer known as Tiger.
…
Mr. Tobias’s life was apparently as volatile as his investment returns. After Circle T lost 5.3 percent in 2005, his marriage began to fray. In March 2006, the police were called to the Tobiases’ home because of a domestic disturbance. A few days later. Mr. Tobias filed for divorce. It was one week before the couple’s first anniversary.
The Tobiases later reconciled. But the divorce filings included a laundry list of accusations. Mrs. Tobias stated that she caught him having an “adulterous affair” and that he “gambled away tens of thousands of dollars and used other funds on illicit habits.” She asked the court to award her $46,000 a month for living expenses. He argued that she was constantly spending too much money.
Even after the couple reconciled, they fought constantly, mostly over money, according to several friends, who asked not to be identified for fear of being subpoenaed in connection with the case or because they were worried that their professional reputations would be harmed by being associated with the case. At one point, Mrs. Tobias bought a Porsche on her credit card and then cried when Mr. Tobias told her to return it, one friend recounted.
They also secretly frequented a gay bar called Cupids in West Palm Beach, in a strip mall along a main thoroughfare. It was there, according to Mr. Ash, that Mr. Tobias first met Tiger.
“Seth used to come in here back when it was crazy,” said Adiel Hemingway, the longtime manager of Cupids. As a flat-screen television blared hard-core gay pornography, he said that Mr. Tobias often came to the club with his wife. Mr. Hemingway took out a picture of Tiger in his office. Tiger is blond and covered with tattoos that look like stripes.
Via Molly I over at Eschaton… The Kenosha Kid says it’s not that Rudy had an extramarital affair that will cost him the wingnut vote. It isn’t even that he billed it to the tax payers. It’s that he conducted his affair in the Hamptons, that hated den of filthy Jews Liberals. They’ll never forgive him for it.
I think he’s on to something there. The moral posturing of the hard right, especially the southern contingent, has always been a nothing more then a thin veneer over the bedrock of their prejudices.
I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate. But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…
…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length: If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends. It really is that simple.
Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done. And…I’m going to bed now…
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.
A campaign aide told the Globe this weekend that Giuliani favors a much more modest set of rights for gay partners than civil union laws in effect in four states offer.
Giuliani has described himself as a backer of civil unions and is frequently described that way in news reports. But he began distancing himself from civil unions in late April, when his campaign told The New York Sun that New Hampshire’s new law goes too far because it is "the equivalent of marriage," which he has always opposed for gays.
Giuliani’s aides offered little explanation of what specific rights he would support for same-sex couples.
Rudy Giuliani faced fresh questions about his judgment last night amid claims that trysts with his mistress while he was New York’s Mayor cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.
The Republican presidential frontrunner’s record as New York mayor is already facing closer scrutiny after the indictment this month of his close friend Bernard Kerik, whom Mr Giuliani appointed as the city’s police chief.
According to records obtained by a respected US political website, Mr Giuliani billed New York City for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for his security detail, who accompanied him on trips to Long Island while he visited his mistress.
Many of the security expenses were billed to obscure city agencies, such as the New York City Loft Board, giving the impression somebody did not want the expense claims to be linked to Mr Giuliani. The expense receipts tally the cost of hotel and petrol bills for police detectives who travelled everywhere with Mr Giuliani, according to the website, Politico.com.
More fun and games, from the folks morally qualified to tell gay people that our unions aren’t fit to be called marriages. Tune in next week as Mike Huckabee explains how having a divorce rate three times that of Massachusetts means Arkansas covenant marriage laws are working to protect and preserve the sacred institution of marriage whilst same sex marriage in Massachusetts has been greatly weakening it…
In case you haven’t been following it…Time Magazine, courtesy of its columnist Joe Klein, has been giving the nation a textbook example of the problem with American corporate journalism. Some days ago Time columnist Joe Klein huffed that, basically, the democrats were once again coddling terrorists.
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Note that this verbiage has now been…altered…on their website since the netroots started blasting Klein and Time over the original text’s blatant, in-your-face-falsehood. In fact, the bill did no such thing as even a child with third grade reading skills could clearly comprehend. Glenn Greenwald has been on it relentlessly since Klein’s bullshit column hit the newsstands…
"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted [in the U.S.] for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.
But Klein’s far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.
The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone — from Russ Feingold to the ACLU — agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered — including the bill passed by the House — requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:
* Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .
The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts — and not an executive branch political appointee — who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.
Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required — as Klein falsely claimed — for "every foreign-terrorist target’s calls."
While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein’s shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that’s not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).
What Time Magazine did, essentially, was smear the democrats as terrorist coddlers in the minds of millions of Time Magazine readers, and if you think that was accidental or merely a case of slipshod journalism you are not paying attention.
Klein’s broader point is even more odious. Along with most of the "liberal" punditocracy, Klein has been singing the same song for years and years and years now. The salvation for Democrats lies in following Republicans on national security issues. He’s been warning Democrats from the very beginning of the NSA scandal that they had better stop condemning Bush’s illegal spying on Americans or else they will justly suffer the consequences, and he issues similar lip-quivering warnings about Iraq: Democrats better stop opposing the Leader’s War or else they will lose.
The big joke here you have to realize, is that Klein is Time’s Liberal columnist. The corporate news media has been playing this game for decades…dragging the American political dialogue ever further and further to the right, by pitting hard core movement conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and outright lunatics like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter against ersatz liberals like Joe Klein. Democrats and progressives are never represented in the corporate news media dialogue, and indeed are usually portrayed as extremists, while the likes of Ann Coulter are given plenty of time to spread their venom in the name of "Balance".
And in that environment, where the playing field is relentlessly tilted toward the right, actual policy differences between the republicans and the democrats have been consistently represented in a "he said, she said" format, where actual facts are never discussed, never even sought. For years now, the republicans have been able to push any damn lie they wanted into the public discourse, with absolutely no fear of being contradicted by the press. And this latest Joe Klein column has been a perfect example of how that not only works, but how the corporate news media remains doggedly determined to keep it working that way. After days and days of being raked over the coals for the blatant in-your-face factual inaccuracies in the Klein column, Time Magazine finally prints a…correction…but not…
Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media. After I emailed Time.com Editor Josh Tyrangiel asking why the online version of Joe Klein’s column remains online uncorrected given that — as Managing Editor Rick Stengel now says — the article contains a "reporting error," this is the "correction" Time has now posted to the article. Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.
All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?
That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.
In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.
That our typical establishment "journalist" conceives of this petty clerical task as their only role is not news. But it is striking to see the nation’s "leading news magazine" so starkly describe how they perceive their role.
After watching our corporate news media passively allow the election of 2000 to be stolen by the republicans, after watching them cheer Bush on as he lied this nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, ruined our economy, and thoroughly trashed our moral capital, after watching them help Bush cover up the outing of one of our CIA agents in an act of cold, calculating political retribution, none of this should surprise anyone. Journalism is dead and rotting in America, everywhere but in the alternative press, and on the Internet, which, not coincidentally, is the one place corporate America cannot dictate the rules of the game.
You should go read Glenn Greenwald’s evisceration of this whole sorry episode, starting Here, and then moving on Here, Here, Here, and Here. You need to see, all Americans need to see, how the news media many of us grew up reading and watching, has bellyflopped itself into the gutter.
For Tax Year 2007 I Will Not Be Bringing My Schedule C Income Onto My Balance Sheet
Via Atrios…
From CNBC: "Citigroup will not be bringing its SIV assets onto their balance sheet."
SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle. The Wiki article isn’t bad…go read it for some insight into why big capital is getting anxious about what’s happening now due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse. Basically what Citigroup is trying to do here is a little creative Enron style shell company book keeping in the hope of propping up their market value. Oh no…those aren’t Our worthless assets…they belong to that company over there…er, the one we created to hold those worthless assets… What’s…astonishing…is how brazen they’re apparently being about it.
And you thought the stock market was the only form of gambling Wall Street did. Oh goodness no…
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
Via This Modern World… How our corporate news media covers the Writer’s Strike…
Atrios catches some anti-WGA strike bias on CNBC, a network that prides itself in catering to “business executives and financial professionals that have significant purchasing power”. The chyron reads :
WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?
4,434 Hollywood guild writers worked full-time last year.
Average salary: $204,000
Many earned $1 million or more
Well, to answer CNBC’s question, they aren’t fighting for “significant purchasing power”. They’re fighting for the financial security that would allow their members to remain in the middle class.
Middle class? Two hundred grand sounds like a good deal, but remember that’s the average salary. This number was chosen specifically because CNBC and the studios on whose behalf they’re arguing want you to believe that most writers are spoiled brats whining about their six-figure incomes. But in a case like this in which a deliberately-vague “many” WGA members earn over $1 million, the “average” income is misleading. A much more important measurement of writers income is the median.
For a good illustration of the difference between “average” and “median” incomes, let me refer you to this graph from the classic book “How to Lie With Statistics” (used without permission. go buy it now!) :
If you add up all of the salaries and divide it by the number of employees, you come up with an “average” that is a poor indicator of an ordinary worker’s income. After all, Mr. Moneybags at the top brings home more than twenty times what the dozen peons at the bottom of the graph make. And this “average” income is only earned by one person, who earns more than 20 of the 24 employees on the chart. While the “average” in this case is mathematically correct, it doesn’t represent the typical income. Or to use an oft-cited example, if Bill Gates walked into a homeless shelter, the “average” income would skyrocket, but it wouldn’t change the fact that everyone else is poor.
Now let’s go back to the WGA strike. Thanks to our friends at CNBC, we know that the “average” WGA member makes $200K, but what’s the median income? According to an LA Times op-ed written by a WGA board member :
“The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”
Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now keep that figure in mind when you see these CEOs gush about how much money they’ll be making :
In summary…the big media moguls are waving the high dollar salaries of a few writers who’ve hit the big time in everyone’s faces, so they can suck dry the vast majority of other writers who are barely earning a living at their trade. And our corporate news media is happy to be of service.
The problem with applying unfettered capitalism to the health system is that it takes the purpose of health care away from curing disease and keeping people healthy and makes it selling them health care products and services. Suppose a new superbug suddenly appeared in hospitals all over the world. Suppose it was killing people and there didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it from spreading from the hospitals to the general public. But suppose that all along there were older, generic drugs that could kill this new superbug and could have prevented the deaths of those who had died, but the drug companies weren’t interested in them there was no profit to be had in selling people the old drugs…
It’s not fiction…it’s happening right now. You’ve heard about that new super staph bacteria…right…?
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) — Generic, World War II-era antibiotics may become the newest weapon of choice in the fight against deadly, drug-resistant staph germs.
Physicians funded by the U.S. government are mounting two studies of drugs costing less than $1 a day to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA. The bacteria, once found only in hospitals and nursing homes, are spreading to communal settings such as schools and gyms. Last month, MRSA was linked to the deaths of a student in New York and one in Virginia.
The generic antibiotics are used to treat infections before they require surgery. Drugmakers, meanwhile, are spending hundreds of millions developing medicines that cost more than $100 a day to treat advanced cases. More than 18,000 Americans annually are killed by MRSA, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
…
The grants represent a realization by the NIH that there is a “gap in the current knowledge” about the older drugs and that government needs to step in when market conditions may discourage drug companies from filling it, Moran says.
“We know these drugs work,” he says. “They are already in wide use. But we want to confirm what doctors are doing, and the trials may change behavior somewhat.”
…
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH, says the grants were intended to fill a vacuum left by pharmaceutical companies. Drugmakers, he says, don’t have an economic incentive to study drugs with expired patents or to develop antibiotics that have limited market potential.
(Emphasis mine) The article goes on to state that the use of the older drugs is only a stopgap measure until newer (hideously expensive) drugs can be developed. But of course, those newer drugs will also only be stopgap measures too, as the germs evolve and develop resistance. But look at this confession here, that the profit motive doesn’t work in health care, and so the government has to step in and do these tests. Drugs may already exist that kill this new superbug, but we don’t know that, because the drug companies aren’t interested in selling them because they can’t make enough profit on them.
And the bottom line there is, people are dying for the sake of drug company profits. Welcome to the best health care system in the world, according to the republicans. And obviously what’s so good about our health care system is how much money it makes for the drug companies. That’s the purpose of health care in George Bush’s America. Not to cure sick people. Not to keep healthy people healthy. The purpose of health care in America is to make drug company executives rich.
Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.
Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time. Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places. I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections. The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear. The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal.
And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility. Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night. When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty. The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close. The national debt has skyrocketed. So have foreclosure rates. People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum. And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes. I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.
"Greed is good", they said. People should have paid more attention. No, greed is not good. Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year. Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year. Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow. There is only now. Right now. I want it Right Now. "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.
People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.
But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”
People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”
Bush is not incompetent. He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power. Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They don’t matter. Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow. Greed is good. Or to put it succinctly:
SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror,who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:
"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"
….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."
Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?
You got what you voted for. The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print. You didn’t read the bold print.
My brother and I were talking last night about the sub prime loan whirlwind and the housing market drop. He’s a home improvement contractor and business where he lives is actually still very good for him (he has a good name in the market where he does business). But he’s been renting now for ages and he’d like to buy if home prices would just come down a little. Unlike a lot of folks, he wasn’t the type to be suckered in by any of the creative financing schemes that are currently causing people to loose their homes, and CEOs to loose their jobs.
Anyway…I just thought he (and you) would appreciate this little blurb today from Atrios…
Deep Thought of the Day
Nobody could have predicted that it might not be such a good thing if the issuers of loans have little incentive to issue good loans.
-Atrios 09:27
There’s a big part of the problem right there. The other big part, is that the anti-government republicans are in charge, and they could be reliably counted on to look the other way while Wall Street went crazy with other people’s money.
First, understand that there is no social security crisis. That’s a right wing scarecrow of the same substance as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. There is no crisis.
Which is not to say it couldn’t be shored up a tad. Fine. But Joshua Marshall has it exactly right about even opening up a discussion on that at the moment…
When it comes to the policy and number-crunching nitty-gritty of Social Security I’m definitely an amateur. But I think I’ve got a decent sense of the political-economy of the question. We need to remember that now and for at least a decade into the future Social Security is actually subsidizing the rest of the federal budget. The program brings in much more than it pays out. As we all remember from the voluble debates two years ago, the surplus is being used to buy US government bonds which go into the Trust Fund. And that socked away money will keep the program solvent through the middle of this century as the baby boomers retire, and revenues in no longer cover promised payments out.
We’ve been doing that for about a quarter of a century.
The problem on the political side of the equation is that the enemies of Social Security have spent a couple decades arguing that the Trust Fund doesn’t exist or that it is simply a bookkeeping device with no true financial meaning. If that’s true, it means that American workers have spent the last twenty-five years using their payroll taxes to subsidize general revenues and make it easier to float big tax cuts for upper-income earners without getting anything in return.
If we start pumping a lot more money into Social Security coffers now it will by definition go into more government bonds, which is another way of saying that it will go toward funding our current deficit spending. In fact it will enable more deficit spending and probably more upper-income tax cuts because it will make the consequences of both easier to hide.
If we want to push the buffer of the Trust Fund further out onto the horizon, then fiddle with payroll taxes when Social Security would need to start dipping into Trust Fund. In other words, in a decade or so. I see no reason why this approach doesn’t work just as nicely then as it would now.
As Paul Krugman noted in the interview I did with him a few weeks ago, the window of time we had to seriously pare down the national debt to prepare for the retirement of the baby-boomers is close to over. Still, though, our best way of ensuring the future health of Social Security is to stop running up the national debt now. So I’m very reluctant to put more payroll taxes in the pot while we’re still running big deficits because of the Bush tax cuts. The money will just go to subsidizing that irresponsible fiscal policy.
If there is any sense in which the ‘Trust Fund’ is not ‘real’ it is that it must be paid back from general revenues. And that will only be harder the more other debt we’re running up. So rather than solving the problem, I think we’re actually enabling it.
You gotta love the republicans. They’ve maneuvered the nation into a place now where any honest, good faith attempt to tweak improvements into the system can only make matters worse. Until they’re out of power, the best course is to not only do nothing, but to not even discuss doing anything.
At least Fox doesn’t own nearly all the TV stations in most places. But in many parts of the country, a Clear Channel radio station in one format or another is all you get.
When the republicans set out to abolish FCC media monopoly rules, many people warned that it would lead to a stifling of variety on the airwaves. Sure enough, only those of us who can afford now to have a satellite radio in the car can get something approximating the breadth that was once there to be found on the radio dial. Clear Channel has single handedly killed radio for most of us. But it would be a mistake to think that it’s just about peddling junk music to the lowest common denominator for profit. Oh, no. Consider the new Bruce Springsteen album, Magic, which has been a hit just about everywhere…except on radio for some strange reason. Fox News attempts to spin it thusly…
Bruce: Magic Refused Radio Play
Bruce Springsteen should be very happy. He has the No. 1 album, a possible Grammy for Best Album of the Year for "Magic," an album full of singles and a sold-out concert tour.
Alas, there’s a hitch: Radio will not play "Magic." In fact, sources tell me that Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from "Magic." But it’s OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as "Dancing in the Dark," "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA."
Just no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio.
Why? One theory, says a longtime rock insider, "is that the audience knows those songs. Of course, they’ll never know these songs if no one plays them."
"Magic," by the way, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release on Oct. 2 and likely will hit the million mark. That’s not a small achievement these days, and one that should be embraced by Clear Channel.
But what a situation: The No. 1 album is not being played on any radio stations, according to Radio & Records, which monitors such things. Nothing. The rock songs aren’t on rock radio, and the two standout "mellow" tracks — "Magic" and "Devil’s Arcade" — aren’t even on "lite" stations.
The singles-kinda hits, "Radio Nowhere" and "Living in the Future" — which would have been hits no questions asked in the ’70s, ’80s and maybe even the ’90s, also are absent from Top 40.
No shit sherlock. Here’s the opening lyrics to Radio Nowhere…
I was tryin’ to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin’ the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
I was spinnin’ ’round a dead dial
Just another lost number in a file
Dancin’ down a dark hole
Just searchin’ for a world with some soul
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
Is there anybody alive out there?
Sound like the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood republican media monopoly wants played on Their Radio Stations??? Here’s Living In The Future…
Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray
Beneath a dirty sun, I whistled my time away
Then just about sundown
You come walkin’ through town
Your boot heels clickin’
Like the barrel of a pistol spinnin’ ’round
Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet
The earth it gave away, the sea rose toward the sun
I opened up my heart to you it got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run
I’m rollin’ through town, a lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash, got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder, tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?
Clear Channel will play this kind of thing when hell freezes over, or President Nice Job Brownie grows a conscience, whichever comes first. This sort of thing doesn’t fit very well into their format. For Bruce to get any airplay on Clear Channel, he needs to be more positive. Give the audience something like this…
The phrase "brought to you by Clear Channel" is partly cut off there, but this is what Clear Channel was splashing all over the nation’s highways after president Junior launched his excellent adventure in Iraq. Says it all, doesn’t it?
What to do? Columbia Records is said to be readying a remixed version of "The Girls in their Summer Clothes," a poppy Beach Boys-type track that has such a catchy hook fans were singing along to it at live shows before they had the album. Bruce insiders are hopeful that with a push from Sony, "Girls" will triumph.
I’m not so sure.
Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.
It’s not just Springsteen. There is no sign at major radio stations of new albums by John Fogerty or Annie Lennox, either. The same stations that should be playing Santana’s new singles with Chad Kroeger or Tina Turner are avoiding them, too.
Like Springsteen, these "older" artists have been relegated to something called Triple A format stations — i.e. either college radio or small artsy stations such as WFUV in the Bronx, N.Y., which are immune from the Clear Channel virus of pre-programming and where the number of plays per song is a fraction of what it is on commercial radio.
Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn’t interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no… not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year– across all genres and demographics– radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he’s pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.
"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening– if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is– is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.
Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we’re seeing that right now.
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