Nationalization

Wall Street learns to sing "The Internationale"

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://zeppcommentaries.com/10/11/2008

Everyone’s watching the G7 meeting in Washington this weekend. It’s
widely assumed that if they don’t come up with a multinational,
coordinated plan to restore liquidity to the banks, the wild gyrations
and crashes of the past week will turn out to be just the warm-up act.
Simon Bower of the Guardian sounded this ominous note yesterday:
“Anxiety levels in the global financial markets were ratcheted up
yesterday after credit derivatives linked to the failed US investment
bank Lehman Brothers, with a face value estimated at $200bn (£118bn) to
$440bn, began to be unwound.”

That would be credit default swaps, which are the ticking nuclear bomb
in the middle of the financial crisis, the element that could turn a
crash and recession into financial armageddon.

Last night there were reports that they were going to do what one
member, the United Kingdom, had already done and basically nationalize
the banks. I passed that tidbit along to the right wingers on Usenet,
along with a cheery, “Comrades! We are all socialists now!” which failed
to provoke any laughs.

But now the G7 is talking instead about governments buying up all the
NON-voting stock on the banks, a course that would provide plenty of
risk to the taxpayers whilst ensuring that there were no steps they
could take to mitigate that risk. Control of the banks would remain in
the hands of the experts who wrecked the banking system in the first place.

It’s a bit like coming across a bus crash, where passengers are
scattered all about the place, injured and moaning, and the driver is
sitting in the middle of the wreckage, dazed, smelling of booze, and
unable to explain just how that tree jumped out in front of him.

What the G-7 wants to do is hire that same driver to ferry the injured
to the hospital. And they’ll ride along as passengers.

They need to flat-out nationalize the banks, and restore liquidity, and
they need to do it now. While they are at it, they need to call a
moratorium on mortgage foreclosures (the Cook County Sheriff’s
Department has already announced it would stop evicting tenants from
foreclosed properties, an act of rebellion that I hope spreads), and
they need to completely freeze trade on derivatives, and do it by Sunday
night, when the European markets open. The US will be shielded from the
carnage for an extra 36 hours, because of Columbus Day.

Just a few months ago, even suggesting that the banks ought to be
nationalized would get you loudly dismissed as a socialist by plutocrats
unwilling to take the biggest key to their power and hand it over to the
government. Not only was it not on the political radar, but it wasn’t
even about to get air-borne.

I know a lot of people on both the left and right who will tell you that
the biggest mistake America ever made was establishing the Federal
Reserve. This, in effect, ensured that the nation’s money supply was
privatized, which meant that a shadow authority born of sheer economic
power could spring up and vie with the government for control of the
country. Clear back in 1802, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the danger, and
wrote Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, declaring, “I believe
that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than
standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to
control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by
deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the
banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children
wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing
power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom
it properly belongs.”

Of course, back then, the economy was a tiny little thing, as befitted
an agrarian nation of some 5.5 million people, nearly all of whom lived
in the country. Jefferson envisioned a land where farmers could stamp
their own bullion and use it in trade. Obviously, with bullion reserves
making for far less than a 1% margin, he would probably have to devise
some other process.

But if he came to 2008 America and familiarized himself with the present
crisis, he probably would. He would have little trouble recognizing the
source of the crisis, and would have a remedy similar to what he wanted
over 200 years ago.

Jefferson was far less worried about where the money came from than he
was about where the power accrued. His objection to private banks
rested, not on some fervent desire for nationalization – the man was
hardly a Marxist, after all – but because he didn’t want to see massive
power accrue in the hands of a banking class, as had happened in Europe
since the end of the mediaeval age.

Jefferson felt that the greatest threat to freedom was the rise of an
aristocratic class in America. To that end, he not only proposed that
the power to make money should reside in the hands of the people, but
that all real estate be recycled back to the government for
redistribution upon the deaths of the owner.

He was right: we have seen the rise of a monied class that has twisted
and perverted America, and now we have one of those once-in-a-lifetime
events where its own greed, stupidity, and wretched excess have brought
it down. It happened in the 1930s, and around 1880. It was inevitable
that it would happen again.

Nationalizing the banks may or may not short-circuit the crash.
Certainly it has a better chance of it than any of the other measures
thus proposed. And with a new administration coming, people have an
unparalleled opportunity to take the monied class and bring them down to
size. Yes, they serve an important role in a capitalist society, or any
society which permits private enterprise. But they are not worth giving
90% of the national wealth to for them to squander, and that’s exactly
what has happened. The people can change that, bloodlessly and
effectively, and in manners fair to the monied class but which restore
power to the people.

One minor oddity is the behavior of George W. If you ever need an
example of a worthless third-generation whelp given undeserved power and
position by nothing more than his family name, he is that example. Never
more than a bit player in this whole mess since it blew up several weeks
ago, and more of a joke by this point, he’s been running around telling
his aides that America’s just lucky that he’s the one in charge. I
mention that just in case there is anyone out there who still thinks
George has any connection to reality any more. But he has the sense of
entitlement that is the hallmark of his class.

It is time to put them back in their place, and return America to the
people.

Frank Rich, The New York Times, October 12, 2008

If you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

Read More Here

Bob Herbert, The New York Times, October 10, 2008

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

Read More Here

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, October 10, 2008

Last month, when the U.S. Treasury Department allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, I wrote that Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, was playing financial Russian roulette. Sure enough, there was a bullet in that chamber: Lehman’s failure caused the world financial crisis, already severe, to get much, much worse.

The consequences of Lehman’s fall were apparent within days, yet key policy players have largely wasted the past four weeks. Now they’ve reached a moment of truth: They’d better do something soon — in fact, they’d better announce a coordinated rescue plan this weekend — or the world economy may well experience its worst slump since the Great Depression.

Let’s talk about where we are right now.

The current crisis started with a burst housing bubble, which led to widespread mortgage defaults, and hence to large losses at many financial institutions. That initial shock was compounded by secondary effects, as lack of capital forced banks to pull back, leading to further declines in the prices of assets, leading to more losses, and so on — a vicious circle of “deleveraging.” Pervasive loss of trust in banks, including on the part of other banks, reinforced the vicious circle.

The downward spiral accelerated post-Lehman. Money markets, already troubled, effectively shut down — one line currently making the rounds is that the only things anyone wants to buy right now are Treasury bills and bottled water.

The response to this downward spiral on the part of the world’s two great monetary powers — the United States, on one side, and the 15 nations that use the euro, on the other — has been woefully inadequate.

Europe, lacking a common government, has literally been unable to get its act together; each country has been making up its own policy, with little coordination, and proposals for a unified response have gone nowhere.

Read More Here

The Japanese Crash

A Yen to put people ahead of plutocrats.

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://zeppcommentaries.com/10/09/2008

Ironically, the Dow Jones hit its all-time high of 14,164 on this date
last year. It fetched up today at 8,579.19, That came on the heels of
another sickening plunge of nearly 680 points, most of which occurred in
the final 15 minutes of trade.

That is, in technical terms, a fair chunk of change. Five trillion
dollars, according to one economist on NPR today. To paraphrase a 1960s
Republican Senator, Everett Dirkson, “It adds up. A trillion here, a
trillion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about some real money.” Of
course, when Dirkson said it, he said “millions”, a term that is
regarded as pocket change in Washington these days.

Some people are comparing the present market crash to 1929. It’s far
larger in sheer size, but then, so is the economy. So I went looking. In
the month following the October 1929 crash, the Dow went from 341 to
220, about 35%. It then rallied over the next few months, back up to
about 290. However, by 1932 it was down to 125. Factoring in inflation,
that meant it lost nearly 80% of its value.

Since September 10th, the Dow has lost nearly 25% of its value. That’s
bad, but not quite as severe as November 1929. Of course, we don’t know
where the bottom lies. People think of the Crash as a single day event
that led promptly to the Great Depression, but that’s not quite true.
The original crash occurred in two stages about a week apart, followed
by a fairly steep decline for three more weeks. It made a partial
recovery, and then went into an extended 26 month decline. It was during
that time that banks began failing, factories closed, and unemployment
started climbing. It wasn’t until 1931 that the crash translated into a
depression, and another year before it became known as the Great
Depression.

Free market optimists on the web have been making hopeful noises,
noting, accurately, that the market suffered even bigger declines in
single DAYS in 1987 and in the wake of 9/11 in 2001, and recovered in
fairly quick order, with no depression, or even recession hitting main
street. Those claims are accurate, but in both instances, they were
rogue events that rattled the economy, but the economy was basically
sound. That isn’t the case here. This is a serial crash following two
months of general decline, and it’s happened despite a mind boggling
$3.5 trillion in bailouts from governments around the world, and a
worldwide concerted effort to staunch the bloodletting. Obviously, basic
conditions are not fundamentally sound, and despite what John McCain
opined three weeks ago, the economy is not strong. (That may have been
the remark that cost him the election).

More realistic market advocates are noting that busts come and go, and
eventually a boom cycle comes around, and the smart investors will make
their money back, and more. This too, is true, and I even entertain some
hope that it will pertain in this case. But I’m not counting on it, and
here’s why:

December 29th, 1989 is an interesting date in Japanese history. It was
on that day that their stock exchange, the Nikkei 225, hit a peak of
38915.87. It was fueled by a monumental run-up in corporate debt and
property values. A penthouse apartment in Tokyo might rent for ten
million dollars –dollars, not yen–a month. In a drive for ever greater
productivity, wages had stagnated and workers will routinely putting in
15 hour days just to keep pace with their income of three years earlier.
Japan was a huge fad among capitalists here in America, with the
smartest guys in the room all chorusing that we needed to adopt and
emulate the Japanese model, and that it would make everyone unimaginably
wealthy, except of course for the 95% of Americans who are just workers
and thus don’t count. (They were similarly enthused by the German
“economic miracle” that seemingly beat the Great Depression in the mid
to late 30s).

Then the Nikkei crashed, and it was a gigantic crash, as bad for Japan
as 1929 was for America. It lost 2/3rds of its value over the following
eight months, fetching up at about 14,000.

It was a speculative bubble popping that fueled the crash. If you
compare the rate of growth of the Nikkei from 1975, when it stood at
5,000, to where it was in August of 1990, it was actually above what a
straight line progression would have made it going by the pre-bubble
rate of growth. So the crash corrected the anomaly of the bubble, and
the market came out of it basically healthy, right?

Wrong. The Nikkei stayed essentially flat for the next EIGHTEEN YEARS,
hovering around 14,000. The economy slumped in the wake of the bubble
bursting, and never recovered. Now the events of the fallout from the
vast American derivatives bubble has impacted Japan, and as of this
hour, the Nikkei crashing again today and down nearly 10% in the
session, is just below 8,000. That would be the 80% loss that the Dow
experienced between 1929 and 1932. It just took six times as long for
the bottom to arrive this time.

Still, despite the vicissitudes the Tokyo stock market has faced and is
facing, the Japanese economy, while subdued, it in some ways prepared to
weather the financial storm better than America’s will. Japan, in the
wake of the bubble and growing social discontent, pushed for higher
wages and stronger control of companies. CEOs only make about 22 times
what an average worker makes, compared with something like 450 times
here. The result is that while the markets haven’t made a killing, the
economy has been generally healthier.

For us here in America, it could be as long term, and with harsher
consequences, because America, intent on staving off even a mild
recession, has played out most of the tools they have to level out the
bumps in the economy. Everyone is leveraged (Wall Street talk for “in
debt”) to the teeth, including the country itself. The US was already
hemorrhaging money before the crisis began, corporations were deep in
the red from “leveraged buyouts” and the citizenry carried a mountain of
personal debt, something not helped when the crash in property values
wiped out their equity.

The market advocates are right: there is a bottom at some point, an area
where the market must simply stop dropping because it does have
intrinsic value that underpins the false values given to it by
speculators with far too much money and greed, and phony “securitized”
loans. Nobody’s quite sure where that bottom is. Henry Paulson warned
that if the Congress didn’t act to pass the bailout bill, we could be at
8,500 in a few weeks. It passed it, and we’ve wound up there anyway.
I’ve heard guesses of 7,500, 5,000, and even 2,500. I suspect people
live those numbers because they are benchmarks, nothing more.

If you look at the market from the time the last recession ended in the
Carter years and the beginning of the bubble in the third year of
Clinton’s presidency, you can straight line it out, factor in inflation,
and come up with a hypothetical value of around 6,500, which is where it
would be now if the big boom of the nineties hadn’t occurred.

I suspect that’s about where it will end up, and that’s where it will
hover while the economy at large stagnates into another major depression.

But the Japanese were smart, and put the population ahead of the market,
and as a result, they kept a decent standard of living and a good safety
net at the expense of the idle rich.

If we’re very, very lucky, America’s next government that comes to power
in January of 2009 will look at the Japanese response to their great
crash, and work along similar lines.

Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert, Salon, October 10, 2008

PALMER, Alaska - On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.

So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”

Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.

Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve,” to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. “Every time I showed up her door was open,” said Chryson. “And that policy continued when she became governor.”

When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn’t really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE’s founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin’s birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin’s election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.

But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.

Read More Here

Robert Scheer, TruthDig, October 7, 2008

I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president’s evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the devastating New Orleans flood, the betrayal of the nation by the money-changers—from Enron to Goldman Sachs—that Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House?

What’s next? Pestilence, frogs, locusts or incurable boils? Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a “W” alter ego? For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone’s new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the “banality of evil” that has controlled our political life these past eight years. This phrase from Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the mundane cruelty that so marked the daily experience of European fascism has a frightening applicability to the Republican leadership that has done so much damage to this nation’s reputation for democratic integrity.

Cynicism rules even as ritualistic prayer breaks, as depicted in the film “W,” abound. The pretense of piety earns the president and his accomplices a get-out-of-jail-free card; at no point in the film do any in the top ranks of this administration—captured so accurately and depressingly—accept one iota of accountability for how much damage they have wrought. Unrepentant, the same Republican apparatchiks are employing the familiar Rovian tactic of divide and conquer in seeking to continue their hold on power. Once again, they seek to focus attention on hot-button social issues and patriotic litmus tests to draw attention from the fact that family values are being destroyed by the loss of job and home.

Perhaps John McCain is not a perfect replica of George W. Bush, but the parallels go beyond the senator’s enthusiastic support for the toxic mix of Bush’s imperial foreign policy and his arrogant indifference to the travails of our domestic existence. Neither man seems to have any sense of how we actually live or what we need from government. How else to explain their common antipathy to Social Security and Medicare, which, after public education, represent the nation’s most successful programs? Can you imagine the panic today if McCain and Bush had succeeded in tying Social Security to investments in the stock market? They view government as nothing more than a proud sponsor of the military-industrial complex while ignoring the threat to homeland security from corporate pirates.

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Bush came into office believing fervently that what was good for Enron and its CEO, Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay, Bush’s top financial sponsor, was good for the country. So, too, McCain, who chose Phil Gramm as co-chair of his presidential campaign, ignoring the huge loophole in Gramm’s Commodity Futures Trading Act, which allowed Enron, where his wife, Wendy Gramm, was on the board of directors, to so shamelessly game the energy market.

Read More Here

Gene Lyons, The Arkansas Democrat Gazettee, October 8, 2008

If the economic situation weren’t so grim, it’d be darkly amusing watching conservatives hunting for a scapegoat other than Bush administration True Believers. Hey, they’re all Brownies now. Heckuva job. For a generation, devotees of the very bad novelist Ayn Rand have assured us that greed is a virtue and government oversight of financial institutions an impediment to genius. In the “ownership society,” financial regulations were for pantywaists. In GOP-think, governments exist purely to drop bombs and monitor other people’s sex lives. Financial deregulation has been the Republican miracle elixir since Ronald Reagan. Back in March, Sen. John McCain reassured The Wall Street Journal that despite being “aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight” in debacles like the sub-prime lending crisis, “I am fundamentally a deregulator.”

In between winks and shout-outs to “Joe Sixpack” during the vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin also wanted it both ways. She praised McCain for “pushing for even harder and tougher regulations.” Then she said patriotism means saying, “Government, you know, you’re not always the solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem, so government... get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper.”

You'd think that any adult who’d ever bought real estate, avoided losing his life savings to Nigerian e-mail scams or even spent rainy afternoons playing Monopoly as a child would understand this fundamental fact of human nature: If you make it easy for people to steal, they’ll steal everything, including the silverware and Grandma’s dentures.

Alas, too many heeded pie-in-the-sky GOP theology. The miracle-working market absolved us all from sin; hence, from the Reagan-created savings-and-loan crisis onward, corporate financial scandals have grown steadily larger and more dangerous. But abandon dogma ? Never.

Now come GOP apologists to identify the real perps of the Wall Street meltdown: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, feckless black folks, Mexican Americans and U. S. Rep. Barney Frank, who’s evidently been covertly running Wall Street all this time.

See, while you fretted over Bush screwups in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans, a sinister, dusky cabal built a speculative bubble in ghetto real estate. Overpriced luxury condos were constructed with borrowed money in fashionable Harlem, Watts and the south side of Chicago; also, downtown Atlanta, Newark, St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis and Philadelphia. In Monopoly terms, the entire U. S. economy drained into a black hole of defaulted loans on Baltic and Mediterranean.

So how come you haven’t heard this before ? Maybe because you don’t spend enough time watching FOX News or listening to GOP talk radio. In those precincts, the real cause of the national (and world ) financial debacle turns out to be an obscure 1977 law known as the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA.

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The Great Debate

Hell yes, I'm being sarcastic!

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://zeppcommentaries.com/10/07/2008

Well, if anyone was looking for FDR to manifest in tonight’s debate,
they will just have to live with disappointment. Both candidates spent
more time taking campaign speech potshots at one another, and neither
had anything substantive to say about the exploding economic crisis that
is threatening to bring down America.

Now, in fairness, it has to be noted that during the campaign of 1932,
FDR didn’t make any bold proposals. He didn’t talk about a New Deal, or
how he would make the government America’s biggest employer in order to
“prime the pump”. Instead, he spouted the same genial platitudes about
how America would muddle through and business would take care of
business that incumbent Herbert Hoover was saying. I’m sure if the
Republicans had someone running to replace Hoover that year, the
Republican wannabe would be doing the same thing, dealing with the grim,
scary realities by tossing rose petals and blowing kisses.

And, unfortunately, one of the grim realities of a presidential campaign
is that if you take too firm a view, speak too many specifics, lay out a
detailed plan, the opposition will use it to tear you apart, even as
they steal it. Doesn’t much matter which party; politics is politics.

As a result, nobody expected much from Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he
took office. He was seen as a bit of a buffoon with only vague ideas on
how to tackle the crisis, and it was expected among many that he would,
in a genial, vaguely avuncular way, preside over the disintegration of
the country.

So if you were watching the debate and losing hope, remember that it may
not be the candidates that are flawed, but the system they operate in.
One, both, or neither might be the next FDR. Or they might be
ineffectual in the face of looming national catastrophe, a James Buchanan.

The stock market has dropped 20% in the past week, which by any standard
qualifies as a crash, and the credit freeze was threatening to make
economies and even entire countries (such as Iceland) implode. The huge
bailout plan was a failure out of the gate, and world wide panic is
running unrestrained. I just glanced at the Asian markets, and they are
in free fall. The Nikkei is below 10,000 (it once was at 20,000) and the
other Asian markets are at crash levels. It’s safe to assume that the
Asian traders took no hope from the debate.

As far as the debate itself, McCain was weirdly buoyant and chipper,
cheerfully asserting we’re-Americans-we-can-do-anything sunny nonsense.
Obama was more somber, but no more definitive. McCain hauled out the
idea that the government should refinance the home loans for buyers now
in trouble because the ARMs went up, but that’s hardly new; both he and
Obama have been saying that, and even the useless bailout package said
it would be a good idea without actually funding it.

The audience at the town hall meeting didn’t appear to be working hard
to look neutral and impartial. They had been selected by Gallup as local
undecideds, and it’s unlikely that many of them made up their minds
tonight. The moderator, Tom Brokaw, was testy and sometimes outright
pissy about the candidates running over their allotted time, apparently
having never heard that politicians love to bloviate, especially in
front of a big audience.

Prior to the debate, Republican spinners were talking about how McCain
was going to come out swinging hard, and try to pin Obama down on such
major issues as William Ayers, the one-time sixties radical with whom
Obama had worked on regional projects in Illinois, or the notorious
Reverend Wright, who, according to the GOP, is the only batshit-crazy
preacher involved in politics. Now stop laughing–I’m trying to write
here. Stop that.

I wondered at the time if the McCain campaign wasn’t just gaming Obama,
making the threat to throw him off his stride, and then give him a
top-step-that-wasn’t-there whammy by not doing it at the debate. And
maybe that was the plan.

But Sarah Palin went to the well once too often with her “Obama pals
around with terrorists” spiel. She had a receptive audience, of course,
and word got out that she was saying this, and yesterday’s audience came
prepared, with the loony-tunes right’s notion of what an appropriate
cheer in response might be. She delivered the line, and the crazies
whooped and hollered and yelled, “He’s a terrorist!” and “Kill him!”

Palin, who I’m beginning to think is a psychotic, didn’t seem perturbed.
But the McCain campaign had to be horrified. Whipping up antagonism for
your opponent is an old and honored tradition in politics. Getting a
crowd to start yelling things like “Kill him!” is so beyond the pale
that it occurred to me that McCain, if he had the honor and courage,
could have made a huge impression tonight if he had prefaced his remarks
by turning to Obama, apologizing, and promising it would not happen again.

Of course, he didn’t. Republicans can’t apologize for their excesses and
crimes, no matter how much damage it does them not to. They see it as a
weakness.

McCain relied mostly on a lot of the flat-out lies and
misrepresentations that he’s been using on the stump, accusing Obama of
wanting to raise taxes on “half of all small businesses” and “being
wrong about the surge”. Obama hit back, as far as the irritable Brokaw
would allow, and all it did was strengthen the impression that neither
man really wanted – or could – address the issues the crowd obviously
wanted to hear about.

Obama won the debate on the merits of debate rules, but neither man won
much of anything else. In the long run, that costs McCain more, since
the economic crisis won’t be going away any time soon and he’s now
trailing rather badly in the polls. The electoral map is shifting by the
day from red to blue, and various polling sites such as
electoral_vote.com and fivethirtyeight.com have Obama with a solid 340
electoral votes at this point. Even if he didn’t have much to say, Obama
did look calm and poised, while McCain paced and twitched and grimaced.

The crowd, at least, did its part, asking good questions, and Brokaw,
when he wasn’t sounding like a drag queen who can’t find her mascara,
got in a few good ones of his own.

But like the previous debate, not much happened, both men were far too
careful, and few people came away from the debate with a sense of
satisfaction.

But in three months, one of those two has to be firm and resolute, and
generous in spirit, or America might just crumble. This is 1932, and
this time we have two challengers, and no clue if either can be the FDR
America needs.

Damn its hard, 4 toons, 1 well geared, 1 reasonable, and 2 new 70s. The expansion offers the opportunity to level without there being a gear unbalance, and change my selection of "main".

Currently I'd say Warlock is my main, if only because he has the best gear of the four. But then I've been spending serious hours on my Paladin as Tank and its really starting to show. But then I got distracted by Druid and Priest, and found that things in those new classes were advantageous and interesting. The dilemma is made worse because the two new classes might be interesting only because they are new.

The choices are:

Warlock

For: High damage output, pets for soloing, some benefit to groups, wipe recovery 1/hour, only one gear set needed.

Against: Squishy, no stealth/mob avoidance, being silenced makes you useless, multi-mob encounters can be tough.

Paladin:

For: Plate wearing, 3 hybrid roles, bubble and run, good burst healing, AoE tanking, multi-mob encounters are ok,

Against: Multipe gear sets, hybrid roles require full respec, can't kill quickly unless Ret.

Druid

For: High damage, 4 hybrid roles (melee dps, heal, tank, range dps), stealth,

Against: Gear sets for each role,

Priest

For: Very good healing, reasonable damage, 2 roles, Shadowform is cool,

Against: Squishy, no stealth, no wipe recovery, being silenced makes you useless,

My plan is to play each of them solo and do some questing. For each I'll watch how easy it is to get groups, complete quests, and generally survive and prosper in WoW. Part of what I wish to consider is what I'll bring to my Guild in the expansion too, but that is secondary at the moment. This might be the best time to experiment with a comparison, being that  many players are also playing a round on alts. I'll get to see how players run characters when they are slightly less proficient, and watch to see the differeneces in thier class too.

Lastly as a sidebar: Why on earth does the LFG tool not allow me to flag for multiple characers? It would be so good to mark what I'm after on each toon, then grab the first group for any of it. Sheesh.

Xmas in October

And now for the stuffing of the goose... Bend Over!

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://zeppcommentaries.com/10/04/2008

The minute I heard the bailout plan had grown from 2 ½ pages to 451 in
the space of a week, I knew we were fucked.

There’s the old saw about sausages and legislation, and how it takes a
strong stomach to watch either being made, but it doesn’t even begin to
cover those rare occasions where Congress just realizes they’ve hit an
iceberg, and have one last chance to save the country while stealing
from it with both hands.

The stock market realized what had happened, too, and “celebrated” the
passage and signing of the bill by crashing another 300 points in the
next few minutes.

Sigh. Well, it’s law now. You have the worst president in American
history, combined with a Congress that is almost entirely corrupt and/or
ineffectual, and not surprisingly, the new law is a monster.

I’m cribbing the next two items from what for me is a rather unusual
source: Declan McCullagh of CNET, or as it’s sometimes known,
Conservative Net. They’re actual conservatives over there, as opposed to
the fascists strutting around in the GOP who love to declare themselves
conservatives, and thus don’t hate everything America stands for while
waving the flag as hard as they can.

According to Declan, here’s some of the things we just got:

1. Gives the Internal Revenue Service new authority to conduct
undercover operations. Not against investment bankers or derivative
traders. Against us. It gives the IRS authority to share tax information
with local police, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the CIA. Again, this
wouldn’t be used to track down huge multinational corporations who keep
P.O. Boxes in remote islands to save millions in American taxes; this
would be used to investigate the terrorist sympathies of anyone writing
a letter to the editor calling his congressional rep a bum.

2. TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program has an interesting provision
in it that allows banks to sell worthless mortgage notes to the
government at a profit. So a bank sitting on $100 million in worthless
mortgage-based derivatives can sell them to the government for $150
million, or whatever the government is willing to pay. The rationale is
the extra money will make the banks that much more willing to extend
liquidity to other banks, who will also have extra real assets now,
thanks to the government.

3. As for those mortgage-backed derivatives, they are unlikely to ever
have any value, since the government is not addressing doing anything to
prevent the foreclosures looming over those mortgages which have made
them worthless. No demands to renegotiate affordable rates for trapped
homeowners, no moratorium on foreclosures, not even any rules preventing
more predatory mortgages from being issued. This, in turn, assures that
we’ve just thrown all that money down a rathole, while ensuring that
bankers will be motivated to dig that rat hole even deeper. In effect,
we’re paying people to shoplift. While paying the stores to make it easy
to shoplift. In hopes of increasing economic activity. (Note: there is a
Treasury “guarantee” on home loans, but it kicks in about six months
after a bank would normally have foreclosed).

4. They addressed the issue of outrageous compensation for officers of
failed corporations by declaring that the Treasury Secretary should
determine unilaterally, and on a case-by-case basis, what an appropriate
payout should be. That would be former Goldman-Sachs CEO Henry Paulson,
who got $250 million for leaving Goldman Sachs a couple of years ago.
Boy, is his dance card going to be full! There is one weird loophole in
which a CEO may be limited to a cruddy $500,000 in his final year, and
that’s if he convinces the government to shell out $300 million or more
for whatever worthless notes he has to unload on them.

5. The bill has more shit in it than a Christmas goose. At least 122
Congressmen were allowed to add earmarks for various pet projects. Now,
earmarks aren’t necessarily a bad thing; often as not, it represents an
infusion of federal money into a struggling district that revitalizes a
community. And a lot of green funding provisions that the Putsch Junta
had fought for years made it in. Contrary to popular opinion, the reps
are supposed to represent their districts, not the country. But Congress
clamped down on them last year, and so if they are being put in now,
under emergency rush conditions, it’s likely that they are provisions
that would never have passed on their own.

Some of them are just goofy. For instance, one provision ends a 39 cent
excise tax on wooden toy arrows. It isn’t the sort of thing that’s going
to affect revenue a whole lot, and I very much doubt it will have any
significant affect on the sale of toy arrows, but some asshole
Congresscritter thought it was worth putting the world economy at risk
while he slipped that in. In this particular instance, BOTH Oregon
Senators were in on it. I had no idea the toy arrow industry was such a
Player in Oregon.

A two year extension on a tax code stipulation means a $20 million
windfall for auto racetrack owners. Maybe it was that or start selling
ad space on their foreheads.

They allocated nearly a thousand times as much – $19 billion – to
research credit. Some of it will go to poor, impoverished Microsoft, in
hopes they can build a functioning operating system. Some goes to
Harley-Davidson. I admit to being curious as to what they research. Most
goes to the usual outfits that have been sucking on the public teat for
decades. I’m all for research, and believe it always pays off in one way
or another, but the whole military-industrial complex is so corrupt
these days I doubt much of that money will go to any actual research.

One of the bigger provisions – and in my opinion, a good one – was
funding for PILT, which, despite the sponsorship of Larry Craig, has
nothing to do with fake neolithic skeletons. Payment In Lieu of Taxes,
in a nutshell, replaces funding to counties that the timber industry had
provided since 1908. I live in a county that was devastated by the
decline in timber revenues, and am delighted that schools, roads and
infrastructure will be getting funding in ways that don’t involve
empowering people who want to take out our forests.

There’s nearly a half billion in tax breaks for companies to film movies
in the US, rather than Vancouver BC or Toronto, that are supposed to be
actually taking place in Chicago, New York, and even Los Angeles. This
is a blow to Canadian manufacturers of fake palm trees, but we’re all in
this together, right?

One of the more revolting ones – and it almost certainly involves Nancy
Pelosi – is a $33 million tax credit for companies operating in the
American slave colony of Samoa. There, companies are allowed to abuse
employees, paying as little as a dollar a day and even using them as sex
slaves, and then proudly stamp “made in America” on the slave-labor
garments. “American” tuna comes from there relieved of the burdens of
environmental and employee protection laws.

However, the worst thing about this bill is that it will take at least a
month to start infusing the banks with liquidity, easing the credit
freeze, and if economists and frenzied Treasury Secretaries are to be
believed, we don’t HAVE a month. The economy is grinding to a halt right
now, and they skipped all the steps that could have had an immediate
effect, such as a foreclosure moratorium or even an immediate backing on
bank loans made to good banking specifications.

So with $700 billion gambled, there simply isn’t anything in the bill to
prevent a crash and a huge depression for at least a month.

We all hope against hope that it works. But don’t bet your life savings
on it.

Ooops. Too late. You already are, whether you meant to or not.

Bailout type Cost to taxpayers (Source: Reuters)

Financial bailout package approved this week up to or more than $700 billion.
Bear Stearns financing $29 billion.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalization $200 billion.
AIG loan and nationalization $85 billion.
Federal Housing Administration housing rescue bill $300 billion.
Mortgage community grants $4 billion.
JPMorgan Chase repayments $87 billion.
Loans to banks via Fed's Term Auction Facility $200 billion+.
Loans from Depression-era Exchange Stabilization Fund $50 billion.
Purchases of mortgage securities by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $144 billion.
POSSIBLE TOTAL $1.8 trillion+.
NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLDS PER U.S. CENSUS 105,480,101.
POSSIBLE COST PER HOUSEHOLD $17,064+.

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Frank Rich, The New York Times, October 5, 2008

Sarah Palin's post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.

McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?

Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.

The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.

Read More Here

Linda Deutsch, the  Associated Press, October 4, 2008

LAS VEGAS -- In a city where luck means everything, O.J. Simpson came out the big loser — and his unlucky number in a case full of bizarre twists was 13.

He was convicted of an armed robbery that happened on Sept. 13 and was found guilty on the 13th anniversary of his Los Angeles murder acquittal. The Las Vegas jury deliberated for 13 hours after a 13-day trial.

And then, as only the sobs of Simpson's sister broke the silence late Friday, the lights went out.

Court marshals flipped on flashlights and shouted for everyone to stay seated. Only the judge knew what had happened. It was 11 p.m. and the courthouse lights had shut down automatically.

"Timed out," Judge Jackie Glass said in a fitting epitaph for the story of O.J. Simpson, which has long haunted America.

The 61-year-old Hall of Fame football star was convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery and 10 other charges for gathering five men a year ago and storming a room at a hotel-casino to seize Simpson sports mementos — including game balls, plaques and photos — from two collectors. Prosecutors said two of the men with him were armed; one said Simpson had asked him to bring a gun.

After the verdict, Simpson, the sports-idol-turned-celebrity-pariah, was handcuffed and led from the room with his co-defendant, Clarence "C.J." Stewart. They could spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Read More Here

Bob Herbert, The New York Times, October 4, 2008

Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.

We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:

“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”

Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”

Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

Read More Here

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