Friday Music Blogging

The Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love?

The Buzzcocks were the band that first really merged punk music into the mainstream pop (as this song demonstrates). It didn't stop them from having the same strife that most punk bands I grew up with had, but hell, at least it was music I could play loudly at home with the 'rents in the next room.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The soft bigotry of low expectations. Why did I know McCain would be this desperate?

2) You keep playing that one note on the kazoo, Johnny! You'll fall so far behind, I anticipate that by October 19, you'll have Sarah Palin doing interviews topless on Howard Stern.

3) Between Uncle Ted's pickle and Troopergate, this will be a bad day in Palinville.

4) Sarah probably understands now how Bristol felt just before the little dot turned blue.

5) If you are still on the fence about McCain and Obama, and few of you here are, or if you have friends who are still struggling to make sense of it all, Consumer Reports has a great article contrasting their health care plans.

6) Sorry. As a Finn, I have to crow a little. I figure he enforced the peace by threatening to feed them lutefish.

7) "So...what are you wearing, comrade?"

8) Term limits was, and is, a stupid concept. Period. End of discussion.

9) Oh CANADA! Apparently, conservatives all around the world can't keep their peckers in their pants!

10) Listen, the world may seem like it's crumbling, the government may be totally unresponsive to your needs, and even the dolphins may have had enough, please, just...

Born In The USA

You know, I was born and raised in a free country, not a socialist, totalitarian state:

WASHINGTON — Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash directly into banks that request it. Such a move would quickly strengthen banks' balance sheets and, officials hope, persuade them to resume lending. In return, the law gives the Treasury the right to take ownership positions in banks, including healthy ones.

Effectively, this gives the US Federal government the right to dictate bank policy, decisions, and effectively makes the US Government a shareholder, directly dependent on the quarterly profit of these firms.

 

This is not freedom, folks. Banks will be obligated to conform not just to the regulations and laws the US Congress has passed, as overseen (however poorly) by the executive branch, but to the caprices and whims of whatever man sits in oversight, presumably Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary until January 20, 2009.

 

And who knows who, beyond that?

 

Now, that person may make good decisions, possibly. And he may influence better oversight and policy from the bank managers and boards themselves. But he also may make terrible decisions, terrible choices, and that alone makes this a really bad idea. After all, underpinning each and every bank in America, each and every investment bank in America, is the hard-earned money of the American worker. Those are your savings accounts that WaMu leveraged out to lend to mortgagors. Those are your checking accounts that Wachovia invested to earn themselves an extra few pennies in income.

 

And these were people who were supposed to be experts! Now turn this power over to someone with a political agenda.

 

Do you see where this might go? Imagine a bank in New York state that has lent money to build an abortion clinic, overseen by a McCain Treasury Secretary shoved down his throat like Sarah Palin was. Or a bank in Arkansas that's been forced by court order to lend money to minority clients for affordable housing, something guaranteed not to give the same return as a commercial property in Little Rock.

 

Suddenly, the government is not only in a position to dictate policy, but enforce it from inside, with little or no dissent. Imagine if in the 1950s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a credit card from a bank run by the government, the same government that tacitly allowed the states to determine segregation policies? Do you honestly think they would listen to a lone nutcase? Or would they yank that card, freeze hsi assets, and bring him to "justice"?

 

It gets worse, folks. Just the other day, there was talk that the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve might step in to buy commercial paper issued by companies like General Motors, or IBM, or Campbell's Soup. Now take those banking scenarios and extend them to buying food, clothing, shelter, or transportation.

 

And the bad news is capped off with the little notice but plaintive wail of individual states now unable to make good on their own bond issues, unable to make interest payments, unable to provide sufficient collateral for the funds they've borrowed, in danger of default.

 

Not only are they having trouble making good on these bonds, but they can't even refinance them because the credit markets are effectively closed until the bailout funds are made available, which may take months.

 

Careful readers of this blog will note that more than two years ago, I predicted the worst economic meltdown this nation, this world, has ever faced.

 

I underestimated the threat. This will make the Great Depression look like a picnic.

Poor Kathleen Parker

Last week, I pointed out how the scales fell away from Kathleen Parker's eyes and she suddenly realized to her regret that some of her colleagues on the right don't take kindly to criticisms.

 

Well, K-Pax has had yet another revelation about her instigated brand of politics:

 

But words can have more serious consequences than lost votes and we've already had a glimpse of the Palin effect.

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post reported that media representatives in Clearwater were greeted with taunts, thunder sticks and profanity. One Palin supporter shouted an epithet at an African-American soundman and said, "Sit down, boy."

McCain may want to call off his pit bull before this war escalates.

Yea, um, not to put too fine a point on this, K-Pax, but you brought this on yourself. Where were you when your conservative "colleagues" were calling Bill Clinton a "scumbag"? When Rush Limbaugh was calling Chelsea Clinton a "dog"? When John McCain was laughing when constituents were calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch"?

 

The comments to this column, which is actually fairly reasonable until you consider who is writing them, make K-Pax out to be a criminal or worse. Perhaps this experience will have softened her, I don't know. I can only hope that she can find some solace in the fact that she's not the first, nor the last, person to be the target of the hate-filled venom of the Town Hall mafia.

The Paradigm of the Progressive Pyramid

This is how government services, and for that matter, personal income, are currently skewed. The top 1% of income earners (including corporations) get the first drops of tax money to trickle down from government:

 

Those at the bottom, and this is in accordance with supply side economics, get the last drops of government tax policy. It is supposed to trickle down to those with the least, those who do the bulk of the grunt work that runs the economic engine of this nation and it's corporations.

In theory. And in a strictly capitalist society, this is precisely the way things are supposed to run: Those with investable capital put their wealth on the line, take the risk, and reap the rewards of that risk, mostly off the backs of those who do not have the wealth to strike out on their own. If the risk blows up, the ones who lose the most are the folks who funded the venture in the first place, who hired the people to run the business that failed.

In private enterprise, for the most part, this is a highly efficient system, weeding out the weaker companies while rewarding the stronger. There is a kind of savage logic to this. After all, no one is supposed to have emotional feelings about a corporation (nor should a corporation have human rights, but that's a different essay.)

A codicil: I am neither cheering or criticizing capitalism, per se, merely pointing out how it is supposed to work from a clean, clinical, theoretical point of view of how for-profit economics works.

Government is not a for-profit venture, and yet the benefits accruing to society from government seem to skew, indeed even reward, the top one percent to the detriment of every income group below it.

When the economy is in trouble, who is the first to get help inthe forms of tax breaks and incentives? Big corporations. The wealthy. When the economy is humming along, who is the first to reap the benefits of higher tax revenues? Big corporations. The wealthy.

Let's take the infamous "Bridge To Nowhere" in Alaska, which connected the town of Ketchikan to the seaport across a small. That seaport was a destination for tourists travelling by cruise ship, and would facilitate their travel into town (it would cut miles off the drive around the end of the inlet, and hours off ferry rides). Who benefitted? A handful of cruise operators, and the town of Ketchikan.

Now, I'm not arguing against tourism in Alaska, to be sure. Ketchikan is probably a lovely place if so many ships are willing to dock there. What I am arguing against is lining the pockets of greedy cruise operators when times are good with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. If the bridge was so necessary, let them pool their money together and build it themselves. Let the state of Alaska and the town of Ketchikan kick some money in. It's a local matter, and should have been handled locally.

But that's not how government works, is it? This is how government should work:

You'll note that here, the people who need the most help are the ones most directly benefitting from the "rain" of government money. But notice something else: this graphic presentation hints at something that would be of great benefit economically to the wealthy.

 

The "funnel" effect: By distributing funds in this fashion, each level would end up "paying forward" whatever benefits they didn't directly use themselves. The rich would continue to aggregate wealth, just not as directly as they do now.

 

Let's take the recent spate of bailouts: despite running annual deficits alarmingly close to a half trillion dollars, we're suddenly informed that, somehow, the Fed managed to find almost a trillion dollars of government money to use to help bailout banks and investment banks.

 

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. So the question must be asked: if you could find that now, in a crisis, why couldn't you find it before the crisis to help people pay down their mortgages, or at least keep current on their payments?

 

A trillion dollars divvied up amongst 330 million Americans works out to around $3,000 per person. If you're late on your mortgage, that could go a long way to helping you catch up. If you don't have a mortgage or credit card bills, you'd probably end up spending it on something nice (yea, a percent or two of you would end up saving it, but even that's OK, since it would put money back into the capital markets). $3,000 would buy a couple of nice meals for a rich person. Indeed, they'd be the most likely to spend it outright.

 

What's standing in the way of this? It is how politics works. The fact that the poorest 20%, the poorest 60%, can't buy the influence that the richest one percent can.

 

Re-read that again: the poorest majority of this country is outspent in politics by the richest one percent. 180,000,000 people have a weaker voice in a democracy than 3,000,000!

 

(To my critics, I know I'm mixing apples and oranges a little here, talking about the richest one percent in terms of corporations and then citizenry and back again, but the numerical impact of a few tens of thousands of corporations on numbers of this magnitude is minimal, statistically speaking).

 

In terms of realpolitics, I have no trouble with money getting you some additional access to a candidate and/or officeholder, you know, maybe you need a stoplight on your corner, but when we start talking about trillions of dollars and we start talking about walking a tightrope that falling from might end the country, then I think we have to redraw the political map.

And flip the pyramid that's been in place for generations now. FDR had it right, and it seems to have toppled and flipped over as a succession of Republican presidents have weighted the money in the apex and pushed it over.

Friday Music Blogging

Heart - These Dreams

I just felt like we all needed something hypnotic and sexy to take our minds off this past week.

Friday Kitten Blogging

I has a flavor! So mush so, mah peeps, dat da bet had to see me dis week. Her sed I has a flavor ob "new roses"! I fink dass a gud fing, right? I tase so gud I lecked da fer rite off mah tummy! Dadby got skeered an tuke me to da bet but da bet sed noffin wrong wif me dat kitty Prozac won hep!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Winter really IS coming soon...To MARS!

2) I have a feeling this is good news for Obama.

3) You might have missed this rather important story this week, so as a service to you, here it is again.

4) I often despair of the attention span and intellect of the American voter, but finally, there are signs of life!

5) Only the Republicans could claim that a not-quite-epic fail was a success...

6) By the way, here's a really cool random Palin phrase generator. She really does sound like the infinite monkey.

7) In the details of this story, check out the name of the California health department spokesperson!

8) For want of a vacuum cleaner, we would not have a pretty decent Scotch.

9) Wow. Karzai has to get Saudi help to get the Taliban to talk? It seems to me that we ought to get our sorry asses out of Iraq and take these bastards out.

10) I have a job for John McCain once he loses this November.

A Real Bailout

OK, I've given this at least as much thought as McCain did to skipping Letterman last week, and I have a bailout plan. It's not simple, it won't be easy, and it will take a few months to work itself through the system. Please consider this as part of the "NotPresident" Campaign Platform ©.

Here goes:

1) End the invasion of Iraq, immediately. In totality, this has cost us nearly $700 billion over the past five years. I don't think this is a coincidence. I sometimes wonder, late at night after that cup of cocoa that's supposed to make me sleepy for three days, if indeed we aren't paying extortion money to Al Qaeda, instead of bailing out the banks.

2) Take that $700 billion bailout and pay it to every man, woman, and child in the country. It seems to me that this is a no-brainer. It's roughly $3,300 per person. People who need it for their mortgages will help bailout their local bank. People who don't need it will either spend it or invest it, which will raise both economic activity and available investable capital. More on this in a later post. And this way, accountability is directly to the American people.

3) Cut out the middle man. There ought to be a truth-in-lending law that traces who your specific mortgage is sold to. If you need to bargain for a refinance or a repackaging, that's the person who you ought to be speaking to. They have the skin in the game (by buying the mortgage, they take the risk out of your bank's balance sheet), plus this forces them to personalize their policies regarding refinances/repackagings. Right now, they can be bloodless, heartless bastards. Let's force them back into the pool.

4) Raise taxes on the rich. Obama has already said he would do this, but he needs to be clearer, much clearer about it. If I was debating McCain, and was challenged on this, I would look straight into the camera and say the following: "My fellow Americans, Senator McCain would like you to believe that I will raise your taxes. Well, I won't, and this is a promise you can take to the bank: I will not raise your taxes. I am going to raise theirs, and that terrifies them."

5) Create government work jobs, make work if necessary. $3,300 is a good start to jump starting the economy, but our workforce will be suffering layoffs. We will need a program to absorb as much of these folks and utilize them for the good of the nation. We have infrastructure problems, we have security issues, and we can create grand programs to modernize such things as Internet access in rural communities (yes, they still have dial up in large swaths of the country!) and bring green energy technologies to everyone.

6) Impose an excess profits tax on oil companies. 40% ought to do it, above and beyond the profit earned at the $50 a barrel level. Hey, we gave them a price support when oil was hovering around $15 a barrel, they ought to be *grateful* to pay.

7) Strong incentives to communities to develop mass transit. Transportation uses about two thirds of US energy consumption each year. That's ridiculous. This could be part of my public works program. Our economic freedom will never be assured until we can get people out of their cars and into work.

8) Treat corporations as second class citizens. Finally, I would nullify the 1979 Supreme Court decision that expanded the "civil" rights of corporations to actually make them more free than you or I. It's about time to acknowledge that in this nation, speech is not free, but is priced at what the market can bear and that corporations have an enormous advantage over true human citizens. If I had to pack the SCOTUS to do this, I would, but I would simply have Congress pass new legislation, and hold a figurative gun to the head of any Congresscritter who felt even the slightest temptation to vote his re-election coffers.

There should be more done, but this is the barebones outline (as I said, I've given this only a little thought) for a bailout plan that rewards human beings for surviving this far, and not faceless corporate entities.

Welcome To The World Of Liberal Journalism, Katie!

Kathleen Parker, that is:

Who says public discourse hasn't deteriorated?

The beauty of this rather naked confession on Ms. Parker's part is, she got raked over the coals by thr folks on her side of the aisle!

To-wit:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.

Those are a few nuggets randomly selected from thousands of e-mails written in response to my column suggesting that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down.

Now, that's a reasonable position she's taken, if a bit provocative. After all, for the bounce Palin gave the ticket early on, the erosion of said bounce has Palin dangerously close to a dead weight on McCain's campaign...not that it needs the help, mind you.

Parker's conclusion from this experience? Well, after careening all over, trying to slap some of the blame on Nancy Pelosi and liberals in general, she finally sputters forth this set of bromides:

The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn't sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.

Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)

Well, at least she's back to acknowledging that the fault, my dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

And may you long remain beneath our contempt, madam.

Obama's Best. Day. Ever.

Wow! To read up on both Memeorandum and the Google News homepage, this must be Barack Obama's best day on the campaign trail!

Obama Over Fifty Percent In Florida - So The Daily Show focus group was NOT an outlier!

Debate Moderator "In The Tank" For Obama - The world according to Mickey Mouse, MALKIN, I mean: Black journalists can only now write about white people.

Nervous GOP Urge McCain To Attack - Apparently, they want the negative campaigning to get even stiffer. What else can McCain do? Claim Obama's a "tar baby"?

No Sale- Fudgie The Whale finds that NBC executive Jeffrey Zucker is behind an Obama Youth video...OOPS!, wrong Jeff Zucker! He can't keep his Jews straight, even on Rosh Hashana!

Poll: Obama Has 15 Point Lead In Pennsylvania - Maybe he bought the entire state guns and Bibles?

Springsteen, Joel To Headline Concert For Obama - OK, this one I might go see, just for shits and giggles.

New Voters Like Obama, But May Not Show up at Polls - I've had dates like that. Still, outpolling McCain 2 to 1 in new voters is a good sign for Obama.

Jay-Z concert in Miami for Obama - Not to be outdone, hip hop is representin'!

Palin To Debate As Edge Wanes Among Wal-Mart Moms - You can lead a redneck to a candidate, but you can't make them vote!

Palin refuses to name papers, mags she reads - In defense of Sarah, this is a step up for the United States. She can read.

Palin Continues to Question Human Role in Global Warming - Or perhaps she can't, after all

False Truths

My good friend, Britisher, makes a very cogent observation in comments from yesterday's post:

Im a technical ignoramus when it comes to high finance but...isn't this while mess ALL about debt? Debt incurred by gambling on future profits based not on tangibles but on "prospects"?.

It seems to me that for years now trade has not been based on identifiable tangible need ( barter as it were) so much as on desire.

I mean a lot of the money at stake is surely imaginary. A lot of the wealth accumulated was imaginary. Investments were made without any supporting collateral and then more investments were made on those investments that weren't supported by anything so everyone shuffling money got rich by pure accumulation.

In short investment banks started 'printing' money and trading that money for other money and more money which was also 'printed'.

This mess is actually a market adjustment.

Am I right? Or partly right?

Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus.

I'm going to get financially technical for a moment, but bear with me. I think I can make it understandable.

All investments are speculations. When you purchase an investment, any investment, from your house to a 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card to a diamond ring, you are placing a bet.

See, factored into the price you pay for your house/card/diamond/stock is what are called "future cash flows". These can either be income, like a dividend or an interest payment, or capital gains, meaning your purchase is going to go up in value.

This future income or profit is discounted and added to the cost of the investment (what it physically costs to create). In most investments, that cost is minimal (it is not in the purchase of a house).

As Michael Kinsley points out in Time:

How is the country any richer if the exact same stock of existing housing is suddenly worth, say, 20% more? Other markets produce things. They sell what they produce. When prices go up, they produce more. Not so with real estate, for the most part. This market consists primarily of trading the same thing again and again. And you know the old saw about land: They're not making any more of it. Real estate is the only major consumer market in which how much you'll pay someone depends on your belief about how much someone else will pay you. In this market, prices go up when people believe they will continue to go up. To restore confidence would mean restoring belief in the greater fool.

And he's right, of course. Land is a fixed commodity, but there is plenty of land in the country, believe it or not, since half the population lives within 150 miles of a coastline. Yes, you want to be close to your job, but on the other hand, the way the economy is trending and the way workforces are being distributed and outsourced, you might want to live away from a city and telecommute now.

Land prices should probably fall back further, based on this alone.

But I digress. Kinsley's larger point, that buying a home is betting that you can get a sucker to pay even more for it after you've lived in it and aged it, is valid. Not only valid, but has been the basis of real estate sales since postwar America in the 50s.

Too, the perception that, by mortgaging nearly 100% of the cost to purchase you are in effect playing with house money, feeds into this conceit. You are gambling with money you have little responsibility for, because if you walk away from the mortgage, hey, the bank will foreclose, sell your house, pay off your mortgage and you still have a little left over, if the system works "the way its supposed to".

That's not to trivialize foreclosures: they are painful processes and usually occur because of some other trauma to the family/owner: job loss, medical expenses, or divorce. But if you know the bank will be "taken care of", you have one less worry on your plate while dealing with the primary problem in your life.

The trouble is, as Brit points out, it's all a fucking illusion. All of it. Rather explicity, I might also point out.

When you purchase a house, you should be paying what you think it is worth now to you, to live in, to spend some time in, to establish a domicile. We're not talking about buying a stock. Stocks are like going to a casino: you shouldn't do it unless and until you can afford to lose all of the money you invest.

This is why brokers are formally referred to as "broker-dealers" because they're dealing cards at a blackjack table, and they hold all the aces. The investment game is rigged in their favor and so any bets you might make have to be carefully picked for you to beat the house.

A house is different. A house is real money for a real necessity. If it goes up in value, then that's a bonus. But that shouldn't be the reason you go out and buy a house. You should buy a house because you need a house.

Now, you're sitting there thinking I'm kicking the American homeowner while he's down. I am, but I'm also not, because I don't blame people for wanting to believe what they want to believe, or for believing that house prices would always go up.

That's what we've all been told. And there's where the blame lies. Who told us? The bankers, brokers and developers who right now stand to be bailed out. The people who marketed "zero money down, interest only loans" without warning us that in five years, you'd have to start paying down principal AND that interest rates would like double or even triple! There is no way in the world your income can triple in five years, unless you are extremely fortunate.

The difference here is, while those banks and you gambled that you might earn enough money in five years to actually pay down your loan, or that your house might accumulate enough new value to pay off the mortgage on a sale, you couldn't have known better, while they should have!

They are financially savvy and you are not. Or at least they are supposed to be, which is why they are supposed to be licensed mortgage broker-dealers. But past history dictates that even the "experts" are not expert when things get complicated enough.

Hell, even I couldn't have foreseen the depth of this crisis, altho I had an inkling and indeed let my "inner pessimist" run amok on this blog about the coming collapse of the American economy.

There's a bitter lesson to be learned from all this: nothing, no part of your life, is without risk, is not a gamble of one sort or other. Houses were supposed to be the safest investment you could make. Indeed, they were the single largest investment you could make.

You have to start thinking about what you buy and how much you pay for it in terms of purchasing a car (the second largest purchase most people will make in their lifetimes, and an object lesson): what can the actually asset you are buying do for you?

See, cars only lose value when you drive them off the lot, at least for the first twenty years, and even then, you have to have taken immaculate care of them for them to earn back your original purchase price, even. The rational decision with a car is to buy one you can drive into the ground, making it cost as little as possible for the value attained from it (hauling groceries, taking vacations, commuting). You want to drive the car so much that the cost to own per mile is as small as possible.

So it should be with your house. You ought to buy a house that means something to you in twenty years, that makes it worth the purchase price, and forget that it *might* increase in value enough for you to retire on.

And screw the economic royalists and their attempts to shove down your throat some illusion. You're better than that!

Gravity Sucks

As anybody who's ever ridden a bicycle or even stood up knows, what goes up must come down.

This is as true for the stock market as it is for anything else. Granted, it's a whole lot harder for the market to fall back to sea level, something about retained earnings and asset values underpinning stock prices, but trust me on this: it is not impossible.

Enter Paul Krugman:

...The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out — sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it’s not what you’d actually call a good plan, and it won’t end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.

Absolutely.

I'm not arguing that this is the mother of all financial crises. I am arguing, however, that the MOAFC stands a better chance of happening now, when the market is weakened and the solutions ineffectual, just like an opportunistic flu is more likely to incubate when the body's defenses are weakened.

The trouble with this bailout package is, it's like giving a bandage to a patient who's suffered a heart attack because he got a papercut filling in his admittance forms.

The real trouble is, well, ask a hundred pundits the cause of this problem, and you'll get a hundred different answers, all of them wrong.

Ask a hundred different economic pundits and you'll get a hundred different answers, of which 95% are incomplete.

Make no mistake about this: this crisis is pervasive and infiltrates the coziest sectors of our economy, and the world's economy. There was no single simple cause and there will not be a single answer, although the ultimate solution may end up being enormously simple. I think. I'll post more on my solution later this week.

We were worried about avian flu? This is an economic avian flu.

Curiously and coincidentally, this flu, like the avian one, has its roots in Asia. America exports debt. Period. We're good at it. We export roughly $700 billion annually (there's a reason that the bailout was pegged at that figure, and that's the reason right there).

Asian nations, flush with cash as their economies have overheated, have invested heavily in American debt, first in Treasuries bill and notes, and then when the purchase of those became unprofitable (for the same reason mortgages became attractive) in mortgage backed securities.

The gamble everyone made was that housing prices could only keep going up. Remember the title of this column?

As housing prices peaked and slid down a little, banks stopped lending money, forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to step in to keep the supply of mortgages consistent with the (overmarketed) demand.

How many Ditech.com and Countrywide commercials were there each hour just a few years ago? Five? Ten? Twenty? It's no surprise that these companies were the canary in the flu mine. They had the riskiest loans with the least capitalization, and needed to borrow the money they were lending.

And banks were only too happy to lend to them. Why? Because banks knew that the Fed and Treasury would step in when things got hairy. After all, the Fed helped arrange the bailout Long Term Capital Management. They'd have to step in where people's homes were at risk!

This is not the only cause of the current crisis and books will be written about them all, until eventually a comprehensive picture is put together, but I think this is a reasonable timeline of this crisis and how it unfolded. Call it the tree on which to hang the ornaments.

But like a Christmas tree, what goes up eventually must come down...

Goodbye Old Friend, Redux

I had actually wanted to find the poster that my sister had on her dorm wall many many years ago, but I found this and realized it had more meaning to me.

What can I say that hasn't been said by a billion other people?

I met Paul Newman once in my life. He worked closely with one of the men who owns the firm I work for, so six years ago or so, Newman came up to the offices and I "chanced" by to get a signature. He was a gracious and lovely man, unassuming and despite people still fawning over him after nearly fifty years of fame, didn't tire of us.

Goodbye, Paul.

Goodbye, Old Friend

Eulogies are hard to write. I know, that sounds like a whine.

Saying goodbye is hard. Saying goodbye to someone or something you've known all your life is harder, but I suppose we all must do it.

I grew up a Mets fan, which by definition means I grew up enjoying losing. From the lovable laughable team of Casey Stengel to the current crop of underachieving fuckheads (Scott Schoenweiss Schoe-n-tell is forever etched in my memory as the second worst reliever the Mets have ever had, second only to Doug Sisk Risk), a Mets fan learns to live with losing.

We also learn to live outside the spotlight, in the shadow of the bigger older brother across the Hellgate, the Yankees.

And so here we come to the nub of Shea Stadium. Mets fans love Shea, precisely because like us, it sits in the shadows of its older bigger famous sibling, Yankee Stadium.

Shea Stadium is the city. Yankee Stadium is a suburb. Shea Stadium sits across a small channel from the second busiest airport in the region, LaGuardia. Yankee Stadium rises up out of a park. At Shea, the smell of decaying fish and seaweed drifts and hangs over a game like a shroud. At Yankee Stadium, you might get a whiff of a nearby apartment building's cooking.

Shea sits amidst junkyards and hubcap dealers. Yankee Stadium sits amongst people, but somehow seems disconnected from them, like the dandy who brings his Bugatti to the local gas station because it broke down there on 161st Street.

Shea is of the people. Yankee Stadium is near the people.

Shea is undoubtedly one of the ugliest stadiums ever built. Conceived for two sports, designed for neither, and hurriedly built to open in time with the 1964 World's Fair, Shea exuded the early Sixties optimism for technology and minimalist architecture: get it up and get it built.

My dad was on the project that tore down the old Polo Grounds, the Mets first home. I remember walking that field as a young boy: it was cavernous and loud and echoed with the ghosts of crowds past, who watched the New York Giants play there, and Willie Mays and Ralph Branca.

I've had many opportunities to be on the field at Shea, both as a would-be player scouted for the organization, as a competitive athlete whose races often ended at home plate, and as a fan. It was always, always quiet in those dank mornings by the bay, as if God himself napped in the loge level.

And yet, so many of my memories these past 44 years have been loud ones. I even live-blogged a game in 2006 (sadly, the audio is a dead link) when the Mets captured the Eastern Division title, one of the few years where they achieved something, where they truly were contenders. I remember sitting for The Police concert in 1983, and watching the entire stadium bounce up and down as ninety thousand people stood and danced during "Don't Stand So Close To Me".

Like any good friend, I've seen Shea at her best and her worst. I've sat everywhere in the stadium, from the far reaches of the upper deck to the cushioned comfortable corporate seats just behind home plate at field level, and everywhere in between, including the press level. I've been to miserable Jets games there, when it was cold and rainy and windy...oh, the wind off Flushing bay! There is no wind that cuts you quite as deeply, since no other wind can combine with watching Pat Leahy miss three field goals or Sid Fernandez blow out his knee and the Mets get knocked out of the pennant race in May.

I've been to bright sunny games where the Mets lost by ten runs or were no-hit, but who cared? It was Shea, there was beer (or soda) and friends, and we just sat back and made fun of them.

Today, it is rainy and muggy and gray. Today, I go to wake my old friend ahead of tomorrow's funeral. A particular pall looms over the game today, as the Mets all but played themselves out of contention last night. The Mets will do that to you.

No matter. I go. I will wrap my arms around as much of the stadium as I can, and kiss her and say goodbye. And probably cry a little, just as I am now.

See, it's not a monument to urgency, or a house for a second class ballclub, or a buttugly-piece-of-barely-functioning arena.

It is my childhood. It is my life marching down the path in the woods that I have chosen. I mourn the path least taken, the one I should have, could have, been on.

It is my innocence. It is school day field trips to watch Bob Moose no-hit the Mets. It is the memory of watching John Milner, Rusty Staub and Wayne Garrett crank out home runs in a game in 1973 when the Mets made the most historic climb in history, from fourteen games out in last place to the top of the division in a month and a half. It is the memory of my unborn daughter kicking to root for Gary Carter trying once more for home run 300. It is sitting in the miserable cold October rain as Keith Hernandez pulls his hamstring trying to go first to third when the Mets desperately needed a run in a championship series against the Dodgers. It is Steve Trachsel bringing long-delayed relief to beleaguered Mets fans in 2006. It is heartache and it is unbridled joy and it is, simply, what love is.

It is a book and it is closing now. Goodbye, old friend!

Friday Music Blogging

Squeeze - Annie Get Your Gun

Best bar band ever!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Would you give an alcoholic just one more drink for the road? No. So explain this to me a little more clearly, please?

2) I am convinced that Sarah Palin has a little string in her back that, if you pulled it, would make her say "Math is hard!"

3) File this under "Not Exactly Surprising", however, it should concern ALL of us that banks seem to be consolidating. Look at what has happened to our information "banking" system: four companies control what you see on TV, hear on the radio and watch in the movie theatres. Do you really want that kind of control over your money, too?

4) File this under "Even Less Surprising". If only we had a President who could work both sides of the aisle, eh?

5) Despite this, expect the stock market to plummet, at least through the morning. Me, I think I'm cashing out today, and buying back in sometime this winter. I just wish I had been bright enough to buy gold.

6) Meet Android. Jason Perlow is an idiot if he thinks that quasi-open source hardware/software is the way to go in the mobile phone market, where people will actually store and utilize their most personal of information in ways he's not even pondering (but the Finns already have in place). Did you want to buy a soda from a machine, only to have some hacker decrypt your information and steal your 401(k)? I didn't think so!

7) Here's one change Barack Obama has already managed to pass.

8) Pity poor John McCain: even the meeting he was riding into like a white knight on a charger turned ugly on him. Not only that, but it was Obama who came away as the consensus builder! Tough week, man. "Country First" is a noble idea, so long as you have your ducks in a row, I guess.

9) Shea Stadium, as I noted last week, closes this weekend (barring a miracle playoff run), to be replaced by Citifield. To put the Treasury bailout into perspective, $700 billion could buy 13 new Citifields...for each and every county in New York State!

10) Or braces for everyone in Great Britain.....and France, or all 32 NFL teams - 27 times, or 2 cups of Starbucks every day for a year for every person in Brazil, or gasoline for a year for every adult in America. (175 billion gallons of gas), or you could literally buy the world a Coke. One 2-liter bottle per week for a year, or a 60-inch HDTV for every man, woman and child in the U.S., or 10 Monopoly games for each of the 6.7 billion human beings on planet earth, or 7 Mac laptops for every school-age child in U.S., or buy 1 Rolex watch for every woman in the U.S., or everyone in America 2200 McDonalds apple pies, or 18 (3-day) passes to Disney for the entire U.S. population, or 202 T-mobile G1 mobile phones for every resident of New York state, or 373 basketballs for every child in the U.S., or a brand new Hummer for each of the 11 million people on the island of Cuba, or 2 mountain bikes for everyone in China, or every winner of the MTV Video Music Awards 10,000 Lear Jets, or 438 pounds of rice for every single person in Africa, or 200 four-packs or Play-Doh for every child under 14 on the planet, or 400 trees for every one of the 7 million homes in the state of Florida, or a Caribbean Island for every single person in the state of South Dakota, or 1.5 million lightbulbs for every person in Alaska, or 604 rounds of golf on Bethpage's Black Course for everyone in New York. You choose!

11) If you have one, USE IT! I do, always.

12) This ought to be interesting. And I'm biting back hard on making jokes about take out orders...

13) Finally, President Who, now? has any sitting lame duck president ever been this lame that he can't keep his own party quiet?

"Anonymous Liberal" Gets It Right

When I watched the highlights of yesterday's twin train wrecks in the McCain campaign yesterday, I said to myself, "well, the only reason that John McCain cut out of the David Letterman taping (video at link) was to do damage control for the earlier massacred Couric-Palin interview.

 

In the course of that interview, Sarah Palin all but signaled John McCain's intention to vote for the bailout package. And if it wasn't his intention, it is now. She equated not voting for it to initiating a new Great Depression, and you can almost hear the one-liner from Obama: "He voted FOR the Great Depression, before he was against it!"

 

Not that he couldn't use this line anyway.

 

Too, Palin's "I'll get back to you" comment regarding whether McCain had ever passed a single piece of legislation that increased regulations was pretty much butchered, and showed her to be totally lost at sea when it comes to answering questions she doesn't know the answer to.

 

Anonymous Liberal posts a brief transcript of this exchange (video at link):

 

COURIC: But he's been in Congress for 26 years. He's been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

 

PALIN: He's also known as the maverick, though. Taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he's been talking about — the need to reform government.

 

COURIC: I'm just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?

 

PALIN: I'll try to find you some, and I'll bring them to you.

 Now, I'm no Republican, but I can think off the top of my head of at least two bills that McCain supported that increased regulations on education (No Child Left Behind) and homeland security (The Patriot Act). I can't say that he *pushed* for passage of either of those, but I do know that the McCain-Feingold bill set new regulations regarding money in political campaigns and is indeed his signature bill in the Senate!

 

It's OK to draw a blank in an interview and say "I'll get back to you," but your damned handlers ought to be on a phone in another room, getting those answers to you. And if they can't get to you during the taping, they ought to get you as you walk out and hand you a slip of paper, so you can turn around and go back to Couric and say "McCain-Feingold" for her to add later.

 

So The Anonymous Liberal gets it right that McCain's stunt was damage control, to appear on Couric in the next news cycle...yes, news cycles can now be measured in hours, not days...to shore up his credentials. And kudos to Couric for asking a tough question.

 

But McCain suffers far more from his obfuscation to Letterman than he does from the stunt. If Senator McCain had been honest with Letterman, and said "Listen, I have to do damage control today, and if you'll keep it under your hat, I promise to drop by at the earliest opportunity to appear," Letterman would have been fine with that, and the endless replay of "Hey Senator, I have a question! Can I drive you to the airport?" wouldn't be getting more airplay than Sarah Palin's gaffes would.

 

Letterman said it best last night: "What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!" That's common sense and it's going to ring a lot louder and longer with independent voters than "I'll get back to you" ever would.

 

Indeed, McCain could have called Letterman during the taping (both The Late Show and The CBS Evening News tape around the same time) and perhaps made a surprise appearance. This would have salvaged the day, and truly mitigated the unmitigated disaster that was the Palin interview.

 

As it is, McCain managed to limit its exposure, first by "cancelling" campaigning, and then by cancelling on Letterman, both dishonest acts of cowardice. And now, CNN is reporting that McCain wants to delay the VP debate! I wonder if he's thinking of replacing her with someone who's a bit more...seasoned. After this story, it's possible.

 

Letterman said it best last night: "What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

 

Presidents are supposed to multitask.

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

Only I wish this was a joke:

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

VERMONT -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

Yes, it's true, there is a restauranteur who is experimenting with breast milk in *some* recipes in his fashionable restaurant in the Swiss ski resort Winterthur, one of several restaurants in that resort.

Thank God Ben and Jerry have a sense of humour...

Politics Stops At The Border, Right?

Then explain this:

US intelligence analysts are putting the final touches on a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan that reportedly describes the situation as "grim", but there are "no plans to declassify" any of it before the election, according to one US official familiar with the process.

Officials say a draft of the classified NIE, representing the key judgments of the US intelligence community's 17 agencies and departments, is being circulated in Washington and a final "coordination meeting" of the agencies involved, under the direction of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is scheduled in the next few weeks.

According to people who have been briefed, the NIE will paint a "grim" picture of the situation in Afghanistan, seven years after the US invaded in an effort to dismantle the al Qaeda network and its Taliban protectors.

Lemme think, now...what happens in the next few weeks...*koffkoff* electionisonlyfiveweeksaway*koffkoff*

Ah, yes, and a grim picture of Afghanistan would play against the public image of John McCain on national security.

Or maybe not. If I'm the McCain campaign, I want this report released to make people understand that the past eight years have been a boondoggled blunderfest, that has to be fixed.

This issue plays to Obama, too, to be sure: the agent of change trope is tailormade for the case I made for the "Maverick". In other words, the declassification of this report would neither hurt nor really help either candidate.

Which is why it will likely remain conveniently classified until November 5, when miraculously it will be leaked to the Washington Post.

After all, it's important that the American people hear confirmation of what Admiral Michael Mullen said last week to Congress we're running out of time. "I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan," were his exact words.

Couple that with the story about the deteriorating situation Pakistan in last week's Time Magazine, and you have a now-regional fuck up on the part of the Bush administration.

All this is happening while the clown car that is the White House has distracted you with handwringing and bickering over the $700 billion bailout as proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Fingerpointing seems to be the order of the day on the Hill. All eyes focused on McCain's support or lack thereof of Paulson's deeply flawed package, while Nancy Pelosi has demanded strong Republican backing in the House.

Give Pelosi credit. She's at least taking a stand. Harry Reid has all but dissappeared here. Can you say "Senate Majority Leader Clinton"? I knew that you could. So now we uncover the bargain Hillary and Barack came to.

Things are so bad in the House that even the Dark Lord of the Shits, Dick Cheney, can't keep his stormtroopers quiet, probably because they've deliberately kept their minions in the dark.

That's not to minimize the bailout or underlying economic troubles of the country. Bush and company have managed to do what Osama bin Laden, 19 terrorists and four airplanes could not: bring America to its knees.

What it does point out is, yet again, the Bush administration is deliberately paying lip service to an unfolding foreign crisis in order to let it fester to the point where the US is, once again, forced to go to war.

Only this time, it will be for the good of the economy, and not just the oil barons. You think jingoism was the order of the day in the early Aughts, wait till you seen what happens next!

It ain't gonna be pretty, folks.