Friday: Ruh-Roh, The Shrill One’s Hair is on Fire

David Broder, Medieval MD.

Remember the accounts of Richard Clark and George Tenet at the 9/11 Commission hearings about how they were running around the White House with their hair on fire trying to get Condi’s and W’s attention in the summer of 2001?  They knew something bad was going to happen and even went to the trouble of delivering a presidential daily briefing called “bin Laden determined to strike within the US” to Bush while he was on vacation.  Remember how they said he told them it was harshing his mellow and he didn’t want to hear about it anymore?  Jeez!  Why didn’t we impeach the guy!?  Bill Clinton could *never* have gotten away with that.  Oh, yeah, Nancy took impeachment off of the table.

Well, Paul Krugman, aka “The Shrill One”, must have written his last column with his hair on fire.  Our economy balances on the edge of a knife.  One false move and we’re right back to the “Buddy Can You Spare A Dime” days.  You know, I don’t think he’s kidding.  The layoffs are coming fast and furious and pretty soon, the economy is going to shrink in a big way.  But it’s Obama and the Republicans playing games that has Krugman worried:

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

I think that Krugman has touched on something and may have briefly overlooked its significance.  He says, “Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake”.  This is the nail hitting statement of the piece.  Washington, ie, the Villagers, has never had a firm grip on reality.  They have their own fantasy version created straight from the smelly, old brain of David Broder and his friends.  Broder is the equivalent of a medieval physician.  No matter what you have, the cure is to smear it with goat dung to bring draw out the evil in the form of pus and then he will bleed you for awhile.  The Villager crusade against reality started when Hillary Clinton entered the race.  Immediately, they consulted their Aristotle and diagnosed that she had improperly violated the natural order so they sought to return her to her level.  The signs of an impending catastrophe with the economy have been around for a couple of years now, so much so that the podunk Des Moines Register specifically cited it as a reason for endorsing Hillary over Obama.  But this made no difference to the Villagers who were determined that no one should question their authority to wreck a woman’s career whenever it struck their fancy.

Now, this is not to say that Hillary would have been able to save the world.  When she first started out, even I wasn’t totally convinced she could overcome the tsunami of Republican opposition she would have faced.  But circumstances and adversity have a funny way of forging some raw elements into steel.  But this is beside the point.  Hillary is not our president.  The Villagers saw to that.  And since they were so successful, they are now strengthened.  No one stood up to these anachronisms stuck in the past.  They were unable to imagine a future that might be as bleak as The Great Depression.  They are still writing weighty tomes praising the virtues of bi-partisanship and lark’s tongues.

The unfortunate thing is that their young apprentice, Barack Obama, seems to have genuinely bought into the bi-partisanship philosophy.  The Bushies dragged the country so far to the right and the country is so out of joint that voters everywhere voted in desperation for a Democrat.  And now that Obama has majorities in the House and Senate and all the power in the world to set things right, what does he do?  He tries to appeal to… Republicans?  Well, I’m glad to see that he’s made a speech.  That’s very public and loud and finger wagging.  But as we have pointed out before, integrity means matching your word with your actions.  If they don’t gem, all the speeches in the world aren’t going to save us.  We will have to comb through the stimulus package to see how sincere he and Congress really are.  Are they paying any attention to the man with his hair on fire?:

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

First thing we do: shoot the bipartisanship messengers.

Wednesday: Gambling on Resurrection

Japan eventually forced bankers to fall on their swords

“Banks think with their capital.  When they have enough capital, they act smart because then they have something at stake.  When banks lose capital and don’t have anything personally at stake, for the managers and the shareholders, they act dumb.  They gamble.”

That was a quote from Adam Posen from an interview he gave last week on NPR’s Planet Money about Japan’s Lost Decade.  You see, although the bankers are wailing hysterically that this kind of financial meltdown has never been seen before. the truth is that Japan went through something almost exactly like it back in the 90’s when their own real estate bubble burst.  The crash for them took place in ’90-91 and didn’t really affect the Japanese until 1992.  Then it was bad.  The government left the economy to sort itself out.  Actually, it made the situation worse by planning to adopt austerity measures and they announced these measures, like tax increases, 18 months in advance.   Eventually, there were some changes in government and some kind of Keynesian economics wizard who started to hold banks accountable for what is called adverse selection.  As I understand it, adverse selection occurs when bankers hold onto their bad assets, like bad mortgage tranches, for example, in the hopes that they will be worth something someday, while they sell off all of their good assets for cash they need in order to do regular backing business like lending and borrowing.  When Japanese banks were finally forced to eat their bad stuff, the economy turned around. (This is from a non-econ major POV so I urge you to listen to the podcast and send your questions to Dakinikat for clarification.)

The creation of a “bad bank” where the bankers can push their bad loans is probably NOT what Posen was refering to when he said that banks were eventually held accountable.  The “bad bank” transfer that is planned for the US simply gives banks cash for toxic assets and they never feel the consequences of their actions.  They may feel tempted to “gamble on resurrection”.  After all, the capital they are receiving from us is paying their salaries and bonuses.  It’s not real money to them.  No, I’m afraid that sacrifices will be necessary for this to turn around even if it means nationalization.

Obama has announced that he will hold banker compensation down in the upcoming stimulus package.  Executive compensation would be limited to a measly $500,000, which some compensation experts say:

“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. “And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend.”

Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

“It would be really tough to get people to staff” companies that are forced to impose these limits, he said.

OK by me.

It’s a great idea but we will have to see the details to make sure it is enforced.  After all, last fall’s TARP bill was supposed to give us preferred stock in the banks we rescued.  But as it turned out, preferred stock really meant “silent partner”.  We have no control over how the money is spent or are their any requirements that the banks report to us and keep us in the loop.  So, for all we know, they could be back to their old gambling addiction and living it up on our dime.

As Krugman wrote yesterday in Bipartisan Bromides, there is no middle ground here that can be reached by a treacly anti-Randian bi-partisan compromise.

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Obama may be able to get a few Republican Senators to go along with his plan; or he can get a lot of Republican votes by, in effect, becoming a Republican. There is no middle ground.

There are certain procedures and steps that need to be followed in order to prevent a severe recession and decade of stagflation like the one that Japan faced during the 90’s.  Acquiescing to Republicans for the sake of bipartisanship just dilutes the policy.  The question is, does Obama understand the policy that he needs to create?  Or is he so beholden to the big Wall Street firms that got him here that he can’t make them sacrifice for fear of angering them?

Hey, he wanted this job.  He was willing to break all of the rules to get the nomination and there were plenty of people with almost a billion dollars in campaign funds who were willing to help him break those rules.  But it is his responsibility now to fulfill the obligations of his oath, even if it makes him unpopular with the rich boys and even if the bankers and Broderites attack him mercilessly. No one expected him to govern as a tree-hugging lefty but they *did* expect him to govern as a Democrat.   It is his own fault that his scorched earth campaigning split the party and many of us don’t have his back but hundreds of stimulus package house parties are not going to make an inadequate stimulus bill into a thing of beauty that everyone wants to support.  He has to do the right thing or take the blame for f%*^ing things up.

Now is when the shmoozing stops and the real work begins.

B-B-B- But we MUST pay the Bank (Health Care is Still Off the Table)

Taking health care off the table wouldn’t bother me so much if actually made some sort of financial (or logical) sense. Or for that matter if it was actually possible. But, I’m sitting here waiting to go for a doctor’s appointment and a blood test and no one took my diabetes or the co-payment off the table.

You see, we are already paying for health care. A National Single Payer Health Care Plan would only shift some of the money that’s going to pay for administrative costs to private insurance companies murder-by-spreadsheet — using it to cover the medical expenses of the un (and under) insured. From the Physicians for a National Health Plan, Single Payer FAQ:

Won’t this raise my taxes?

A universal public system would be financed in the following way: The public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. The difference, or the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system, would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness. It is also a fair and sustainable contribution.

Currently, 47 million people have no insurance and hundreds of thousands of people with insurance are bankrupted when they have an accident or illness. Employers who currently offer no health insurance would pay more, but those who currently offer coverage would, on average, pay less. For most large employers, a payroll tax in the 7% range would mean they would pay slightly less than they currently do (about 8.5%). No employer, moreover, would gain a competitive advantage because he had scrimped on employee health benefits. And health insurance would disappear from the bargaining table between employers and employees.

President Re-Election Gets Pwned; We Pay the Price

Like Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's

The latest “stimulus package” from Team Obama has passed the House. Hooray! Bold, decisive action from Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats (not a single Republican voted for it). It’s got money for infrastructure spending and alternative energy, too! But as is becoming per usual with our new President, we have to ask: “Where’s the catch?”

Well, if you read the story linked above, something will strike you right away – something that was hidden in the 99th paragraph of the article.

In an attempt bid [sic] to assuage Republicans, Mr Obama persuaded Democrats to to remove millions of dollars in funding for contraceptives for state medical programmes from the bill.

And what about this?

The stimulus plan includes about $275 billion in tax cuts, including a credit worth $500 dollars for each worker and $1,000 for couples.

Yes, Obama giveth, and Obama taketh away. (Please note: Murphy has a great action regarding this bill today. Check it out!)

You see, the original bill in the House did not include any tax cuts. And it CERTAINLY did not include this horrifying idea to take away government funding for birth control measures, which is bad even apart from its obvious heartlessness and misogyny; it actually will end up costing more money than it saves. (By the way, weren’t all the Sarah Palin haterz positive that if she became Vice President, this sort of thing would start happening to women – even though she is on the record as being pro-contraception? Ah, memories.) But Barack Obama strode down to Capitol Hill in all his glory, with many representatives of Big Business trailing behind him in clouds of cigar smoke – you know, the ones who helped him buy the Presidency for $800 million – and lo and behold, the Democrats listened to his words of wisdom! Yes, that’s right – the Democrats are in charge now, and they were the ones who tried to make the bill “bi-partisan” at Obama’s urgings. The Republicans can do nothing, legislatively, to stop the bill in the House, so their input was politically nil – or should have been. 

Friday: Krugman harshes Obama’s mellow

The Shrill One offers some advice to Obama in the Jan. 22 edition of Rolling Stone, available to us 6 days in advance through the miracle of technology.  It remains to be seen whether PEBO will actually take him up on any of this.  After all, Krugman had his chance to speak to Obama when he gave marching orders to the other members of the so-called “liberal” press and Krugman chose not to attend.  (But Naomi Wolf was probably there!)

Krugman offers the same liberal, FDR type solutions that were engaged for the last Depression soiree.  You know, nationalizing the banks, demanding that taxpayers get something for their money, using federal money to put people back to work, new social safety net programs, yadayadayada.  The Grover Norquists of the country are popping carotids left and right like they always do when Krugman opens his mouth.  Krugman apparently wants to drag the government out of the bathtub and commence rescue breathing right away.  He says that the legacy of the FDR programs caused something called “The Great Compression” where the income disparities between rich and poor were minimized and this lead to one of the most productive periods of American history in terms of growth and innovation.  Frickin’ liberal.  Doesn’t he know that relentless hardship builds character and that we’re all post partisan now?   All he wants to do is protect labor, improve wages, strengthen the social safety net.   But we always hear this same kind of thing from Krugman.

What I *hadn’t* heard from Krugman and what strikes me as a damn good idea is his proposal for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

There is, however, one area where I feel the need to break discipline. I’m an economist, but I’m also an American citizen — and like many citizens, I spent the past eight years watching in horror as the Bush administration betrayed the nation’s ideals. And I don’t believe we can put those terrible years behind us unless we have a full accounting of what really happened. I know that most of the inside-the-Beltway crowd is urging you to let bygones be bygones, just as they urged Bill Clinton to let the truth about scandals from the Reagan-Bush years, in particular the Iran-Contra affair, remain hidden. But we know how that turned out: The same people who abused power in the name of national security 20 years ago returned as part of the team that, under the second George Bush, did it all over again, on a much larger scale. It was an object lesson in the truth of George Santayana’s dictum: Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

That’s why this time we need a full accounting. Not a witch hunt, maybe not even prosecutions, but something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped South Africa come to terms with what happened under apartheid. We need to know how America ended up fighting a war to eliminate nonexistent weapons, how torture became a routine instrument of U.S. policy, how the Justice Department became an instrument of political persecution, how brazen corruption flourished not only in Iraq, but throughout Congress and the administration. We know that these evils were not, whatever the apologists say, the result of honest error or a few bad apples: The White House created a climate in which abuse became commonplace, and in many cases probably took the lead in instigating these abuses. But it’s not enough to leave this reality in the realm of things “everybody knows” — because soon enough they’ll be denied or forgotten, and the cycle of abuse will begin again. The whole sordid tale needs to be brought out into the sunlight.

It’s probably best if Congress takes the lead in investigations of the Bush years, but your administration can do its part, both by not using its influence to discourage the investigations and by bringing an end to the Bush administration’s stonewalling. Let Congress have access to records and witnesses, and let the truth be told.

“Full faith and credit of the United States” needs to mean something to the world or it will stop lending to us and trade in our dollars.  When there is no accountability, there can be no trust.  And with no trust, there can be no negotiation in good faith.  What we end up with are nations and people who will be constantly looking over their shoulder worried that they’re about to be stabbed in the back.  I suspect the reasons that the banks aren’t lending to each other or anyone else right now is because it takes a cheating bastard to know one.  In this kind of environment, the worms that lie in the mud have to be forced to hatch out so we can see what we’re dealing with, learn from it and make sure the people responsible never have a chance to operate in positions of power ever again.  Their lawless behavior is going to result in chaos and hardship for many citizens for years to come.  There has to be accountability or a country of laws mean nothing and our money and our word become worthless.

Of course, we’re talking about Obama here so don’t hold your breath.  The guy got the nomination by theft.  (Don’t you stupid Obots go off about how Hillary ran a bad campaign.  Save your breath.  We know who actually ran a bad campaign because he required the RBC hearing to overturn primary results in order to barely eek out a win.  Deal with it, guys.  You elected the weakest link.)  The country was so desperate to get rid of Republicans that they had no alternative but to vote for Obama.  Now, they *expect* Obama to deliver.  There is no use trying to dampen expectations.  Even the least he can do is going to be a monumental challenge for one so unaccustomed to the real business of governing.  But he must do it.  We know it is beyond his capabilities right now but he really doesn’t have any choice and we expect him to burn himself out trying.  He wanted this job, he bought off enough superdelegates to get it, he destroyed a more worthy candidate’s career by waving around his penis and won it.  But you can’t govern using a penis and accusations of racism.  That’s going to get old really fast when an ever increasing number of people are losing their jobs and health insurance.  He needs to implement a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as quickly as possible and ferret out the Easter Eggs left in the executive branch by his predecessor and his Monica Goodling type personnel managers.  Give us the satisfaction of nailing the bastards.

Yeah, he’ll probably dance with the ones that brung him, the very same people who need to be brought to account.  But you can be damn sure I’ll be out here every day of the next four years stirring up enough noise about it.  My expectations are high.  There’s no handicap for a beginner.  He wanted the job.  He’s got it.

Now deliver.

Tuesday: Liberal Great Expectations

Jesse Jackson Sr. wrote a somewhat cryptic column in the Chicago Sun-Times today called Who Will Speak for America’s Poor?.  He gems nicely with the sentiments of Paul Krugman, who yesterday wrote in Fifty Herbert Hoovers, that one of the best ways of stimulating the economy is to start at the state level and keep former state workers from slipping into poverty.  If you get the state to keep employment up with new infrastructure projects, there will be money going to other businesses and tax revenue as well.

Jackson’s column is a bit sly.  Does anyone recall the controversy that erupted during the primaries when Hillary said that Martin Luther King’s dream of Civil Right’s legislation wasn’t enough and that President Johnson was needed to make the dream possible?  Hoo-buy, she might as well have said she was going to go bleach her sheets and chop a cross down.  Hillary never minces words when it comes to inflammatory rhetoric.  She goes right for the jugular, she does.  I know how angry *I* was when she turned out to be the grandmaster of her KKK cell.

That’s why I’m a bit puzzled by Jackson today.  It seems like he might actually be, um, *agreeing* with her but this time he is talking about the war on poverty:

When Barack Obama takes office, he will usher in the greatest period of reform in America since Lyndon Johnson in 1965-66. In a few extraordinary months, Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act, immigration reform and Medicare, and launched the War on Poverty. That effort was an early casualty of the war in Vietnam, but by the end of Johnson’s presidency poverty had been dramatically reduced.

Yet Johnson is seldom invoked as a great president. In part that is because his administration was itself a casualty of the Vietnam War. In part that is because his reforms sparked a reaction, with conservatives running against affirmative action, crime and welfare, profiting from the race-baiting politics of division. By the end of the Reagan era, poverty was no longer fit for political debate. Now politicians in both parties compete to appeal to the middle class and ignore the poor.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign was the poor people’s campaign. He wanted to bring poor people from across the country, across racial and religious divides, to Washington to demand action. He was taken from us in Memphis, helping low-paid sanitation workers to organize, before his plans could be completed.

Now 40 years later, Obama will be inaugurated one day after the holiday celebrating’s King’s birth and life.

He will come with a mandate to get the economy moving, to put people back to work. And across the country, the weakest and most vulnerable Americans will be hoping that he takes up LBJ’s war on poverty, and King’s poor people’s campaign.

Yikes!  It sounds like Jackson is expecting Obama to act like a liberal.  Either that or Jesse Jackson has joined the ranks of the racists.  That almost doesn’t seem possible except that the same thing happened to Hillary.

Anyway, here is another one of those pre-post-partisan pols who isn’t grasping the whole hopey-changey message wherein Barack Obama gets to say he likes Reagan while he’s channeling Lincoln and protecting the people who profited from Bush.  Get with the program, Jesse.  He’s new!  He’s fresh!  Just because he’ll have the wind at his back, nearly a filibuster proof majority and mobs of angry citizens ready to scalp the Republicans who oppose him doesn’t mean Obama has to act like a liberal, Keynesian, anti-poverty, LBJ, FDR type of Democrat.  Heck, he didn’t even campaign as a Democrat most of the time.  Besides, where would be the payoff for the Whole Foods types?

Obama and his bloggy droogs have been very busy lowering expectations and here Jesse Jackson is sticking a jack under the bus.  He’s saying that now is the time for Barack Obama to fulfill Martin Luther King’s dream and Obama, the great African-American change agent, won’t have any excuses.

Damn him and his rainbow ponies.

On another note: The Confluence has been nominated as a finalist for Best Liberal Weblog for the 2008 WeblogAwards.  I’d like to thank everyone who nominated us.  It is truly an honor to be included on the list with other wonderful bloggers.  It’s also our privilege to be representing the rest of the PUMA community.  We wouldn’t be here without you.

I’d like to thank the posters who make it possible with quality content and witty prose.  The Confluence is now my favorite place on the blog.  I never know what to expect but I know it will be good.  Thanks especially to:

RonKSeattle, Katiebird, BostonBoomer, LadyBoomerNYC, Madamab, GaryinChapelHill, Mawminc, Shtuey, myiq2xu, Regency, Stateofdisbelief, Dakinikat, SM77, HeidiLipotpourri, Taggles and all of the other posters who have made this year such a success.

Thanks also to our friends who have featured us on their pages, murphy at pumapac, Alegre, Anglachel, Correntewire, Cannonfire, Heidi Li’s Potpourri, edgeoforever to name a few.  And thanks to the commenters who have created a vibrant ongoing cocktail party with humor, intelligence and biting snarkasm.

It’s hard to believe that we aren’t even a year old yet.  We’ve come a long way, baby!

Now, let’s beat the pants off of Josh Marshall.

Saturday: Matt Continetti Comedy Gold

Some Obots are taking to stand-up.  In this video clip of Blogging Heads TV at The New Republic, Matt Continetti does a brilliant parody of an Obamaphile who has finally come to grips with the fact that Obama is not a liberal and instead puts all of his eggs in the basket of the liberal paradise that is the new Congress.  He’s hillariously funny when he enthuses about how now that Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, she is going to get those new Blue Dog Democrats to roll over just like she did last session.

Eve Fairbanks plays the cynical smirker as Matt tells us all about Liberalism on Steroids.  I don’t know who wrote this material but it’s brilliant!

What’s that?  Not a parody?  REAlly?

Nevermind.

Other curiosities:

• The ugly truth hatches out about the recent economic collapse.  Amity Shales in the WSJ takes on Krugman in The Krugman Recipe for Depression.  What was it about The New Deal that drives capitalists absolutely nuts?  It’s the effect it had on labor.  Yeah, with Social Security insurance and strengthening of the country’s labor laws, workers had greater autonomy.  They started getting paid real wages and had health insurance too.  I’m of the opinion that those New Deal fixes lead to one of the greatest periods of entrpreneurial spirit and prosperity that the country has ever seen. Well, Shales will have none of that.   Shales believes that a job, ANY job, is preferable to a job with insurance.  I’m not sure about that.  I’m listening to Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, on the Dust Bowl of the 30’s and he tells the story of one schoolteacher who worked in Oklahoma for a whole year without pay.  Yep, the school district offered her a warrant that she was supposed to be able to redeem for cash at the local bank.  Except the bank wouldn’t accept it.  Niiiice.  What Shales seems to be missing is that the reason so many people are defaulting on mortgages or are in debt up to their eyeballs is because real wages have actually eroded over the past 40 years.  The social safety net of the New Deal is in tatters.  And when people fall through it, they can’t pay their  bills.  It’s really very simple cause and effect, Amity Shales.  If there is a solution to this current morrass, it *has* to have a strong labor component.  We are the bulk of the taxpayers in the country and if there is no taxbase, there is no recovery.  It’s really too bad this doesn’t fit with Amity Shales worldview but this is America.  Love it or leave it.
• Dr. Violet Socks’ brilliant compilation  of the consequences of electing Barack Obama is reprieved in #13 from early November.  Keep this in mind when you hear more about Hillary, Samantha Powers and Christina Romer.  But I think her recent post on taxation is something we should all be asking ourselves.  We have taxation without representation.  Our votes for Hillary last year during the primaries were completely disregarded.  What is the meaning of suffrage if your vote doesn’t count?  And why are we paying taxes into a system where our representation in the general population is greater than 50% but our representation in elected office is only 17%?  It’s just nuts.
• Murphy at PUMAPac pointed me to this article in the NYTimes by Alex Kuczinsky about her struggle with infertility and her hiring of a surrogate in Her Body, My Baby.  Unlike a lot of the commenters on this piece, it doesn’t bother me that she paid for the treatment or the surrogate instead of adopting.  The money she threw into the system is benefitting someone.  It’s her money and she has the normal reasons for doing IVF- eleven times.  And I think the pictures are a hoot!  Only the most arrogantly unaware wouldn’t see the unsubtle classist overtones.
  

  Alex and Max....and the baby nurse?

  No, what strikes me is the incredibly cold account the author gives of her relationship with her surrogate.  Cathy Hilling, the vessel, loses her identity as soon as she gives birth to the author’s nearly 11 lb baby.  As Murphy notes, enough of the nurturing, mother stories already.  It’s a part of life but not the only meaningful part of a woman’s life.  But the story as written shows Alex Kuczinsky as probably one of the most selfish, insensitive, catty, snobbish, pseudo-intellectual and heartless women I’ve ever read.  Nature unfortunately didn’t bless her with a working uterus.  It’s doubly unfortunate that she seems to be missing a soul.  Pray for the poor kid.

Black Friday

R!$@#%#!$%!!!  Get me out of here!  They’re driving me crazy!  My mother is talking about wills and affadavits and family friends who are swindling each other over property.  I am being forced to watch The View and defend why I don’t like Joy Behar and why I DON’T CARE ABOUT BARBARA WALTERS’ INTERVIEW WITH OBAMA!  I DON’T CARE, I DON’T CARE, I DON’T CARE.

My sister is going to rescue me and take me to the YMCA for two hours of exercise followed by sauna.  Then I might hit Circuit City for a new LCD TV for my basement. Meanwhile, here is the latest installment of the “Who could have predicted?” series.  Today’s entry is from Paul Krugman in Lest We Forget.  Actually, it is The Shrill One who is saying No $#@% Sherlock to his buddies:

A few months ago I found myself at a meeting of economists and finance officials, discussing — what else? — the crisis. There was a lot of soul-searching going on. One senior policy maker asked, “Why didn’t we see this coming?”

There was, of course, only one thing to say in reply, so I said it: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

…

Why did so many people insist that our financial system was “resilient,” as Alan Greenspan put it, when in 1998 the collapse of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, temporarily paralyzed credit markets around the world?

Why did almost everyone believe in the omnipotence of the Federal Reserve when its counterpart, the Bank of Japan, spent a decade trying and failing to jump-start a stalled economy?

One answer to these questions is that nobody likes a party pooper. While the housing bubble was still inflating, lenders were making lots of money issuing mortgages to anyone who walked in the door; investment banks were making even more money repackaging those mortgages into shiny new securities; and money managers who booked big paper profits by buying those securities with borrowed funds looked like geniuses, and were paid accordingly. Who wanted to hear from dismal economists warning that the whole thing was, in effect, a giant Ponzi scheme?

Well, there were *some* people who saw it coming but they were laughed at.  Peter Schiff is the classic example.  Of course, he comes from the Austrian School of economics, which is as austere and uncompromising as it sounds.  For Schiff, it’s all laissez faire and all natural law all the time. It must be a legacy of the Hun invasion.  Who knows?  But this little clip that has gone viral is a thing of beauty:

Who’s laffing now?

Still, Krugman is indulging in a bit of wishful thinking of his own:

Now we’re in the midst of another crisis, the worst since the 1930s. For the moment, all eyes are on the immediate response to that crisis. Will the Fed’s ever more aggressive efforts to unfreeze the credit markets finally start getting somewhere? Will the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus turn output and employment around? (I’m still not sure, by the way, whether the economic team is thinking big enough.)

No, Paul, it will likely not be big enough.  *Someone* spent $600,000,000 to install Obama over our objections (BTW, Gov. Jon Corzine was a former CEO at Goldman-Sachs.  Fancy that!).  Obama has been running from The New Deal like it was the ebola virus.  But he sure has a lot of nice things to say about Reagan.  Ah, yes, the Reagan Era.  Those were the days.  I was a student, Pell grants dried up, tuition skyrocketed, there were no jobs to be had…  Those were the days when a person who was the first in her family to attend college could build her character by mopping floors in a fast food joint at 2am, stay up until 4am studying and fall asleep in psych 101 at 8am the next morning.  It made me the old, bitter, uneducated (with a degree in a hard science) working class (professional researcher) sino-peruvian lesbian I am today!

Grrrr, I need a good aerobics class.

Monday: No blank check for YOU

President Elect Obama, the Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers, gave an interview to 60 Minutes last night.  The New York Times watched it so we wouldn’t have to.  Senator Abstract Painting finally told us what he really represents.  In short, banks and financial institutions get all the money in the Treasury; little people losing their houses?  Ehhh, not so much:

President-elect Barack Obama said in an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes” on Sunday that one of his top priorities will be to “restore a sense of balance” to the regulation of financial markets, but rejected the idea of a so-called “new New Deal” for America.

Mr. Obama acknowledged the parallels between the current economic crisis and the problems of the Great Depression, but said that he supported solutions that are “true to our times.”

“For us to simply recreate what existed back in the 30s in the 21st century — I think would be missing the boat,” Mr. Obama said in the interview. “I think the basic principle that government has a role to play in kick-starting an economy that has ground to a halt is sound. I think our basic principle that this is a free market system and that that has worked for us, that it creates innovation and risk taking, I think that’s a principle that we’ve got to hold to as well.”

Didja get that?  Mr. Smartest President EVAH does not believe in doing his research, finding out what worked in the past and updating those solutions for the benefit of average everyday Americans.  No, he believes in the “innovation and risk taking” of the “free market”.  Well, I’m glad we got that settled.  It only took us a year to figure out W.O.R.M. (What Obama Really Meant).

But wait!  There’s more:

In his first post-election interview, the president-elect also reiterated his support for providing additional assistance to Americans facing home foreclosure as well as government involvement in bailing out the troubled automobile industry.

“It can’t be a blank check,” Mr. Obama said of a plan to help automakers. “My hope is that over the course of the next week, between the White House and Congress, the discussions are shaped around providing assistance but making sure that that assistance is conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all the stakeholders coming together with a plan — what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like?”

No blank check for you, says Lord of Fiscal Responsibility Who Was MORE Than Happy To Vote on the FIRST Paulsen Bailout Bill That Was Nothing But a Blank Check.  When that first bill came around that gave us taxpayers the unique opportunity to buy up all of the banks’ toxic assets but not get anything in return, Obama was totally onboard with that.  Someone in the Senate, we still don’t know who, snuck a provision in the second bill that gave the government the option of actually owning pieces of those banks.  We’re silent partners, pretty much, but at least if the money ever comes back, we’re entitled to a substantial chunk of it- theoretically.  But this was not a requirement for Obama.  He was content to write the banks a blank check.

Now, he could be singing a different tune in a couple of months.  Maybe someone like Paul Krugman can school him on what The New Deal really was all about.  That way, he won’t end up sounding like clueless laissez-faire free marketeer George Will.  We hope this happens behind closed doors would be far less embarrassing than doing it on national TV:

Stimulating the banks, er, economy with money may not be enough.  A NEW New Deal may indeed be what is called for, complete with restructuring of mortgages with HOLC, government projects that put people to work and affordable healthcare for all Americans so that companies like GM can dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves by designing nothing but gas guzzling asphalt boats.  It’s doable.  I mean, he’s only going to have a Democratic Congress to play with.  If things get tough in Appalachia, even the hardest hearted Blue Dog Democrat could be pressured to bend.  Heck, it worked so well with delegates at the convention, I can’t believe Obama’s already lost his touch in 4 months.

You can see where all of this is heading.  We now see Obama for what he is.  The presidency has solidified him out of his air of mystery.  He doesn’t have to play the game anymore.  He could have just said, “Screw it, I’m a Democrat and I cherish the principles of my party.  I’m going to restore the social safety net.  Take *that*, David Broder!”  But he did not.  Personally, I’m angry.  The money is saving the asses of the people who innovated and risk took us into this mess but when it comes to a solution for the rest of us, a New Deal is already off the table.  He must have learned that from Pelosi.  Well, his backers got what they wanted- the ability to to whatever the f^&* they want without consequence and absolutely no obligation to the rest of us.  What’s that you say, Obamaphiles?  That’s not what you wanted??

Tsk, tsk, $600,000,000 in small money donations just doesn’t buy what it used to.

Speaking of money, MABlue pointed me to this chilling article in Portfolio about The End of Wall Street.  Read it and you will want to go sharpen your pitchfork and hunt down the person who dreamt up 401K’s.  There isn’t a prison harsh enough for the people who did this to us.

In the meantime, PUMAs, it’s time to work off those turkey dinners in advance.  We’ve been sedentary for a year now and we need to get up and boogie before the fat hardens.  So, make a commitment to yourselves to put in at least 30 minutes of heart pumping activity into your day this week.  I’m hitting the fitness center at work.  I have stepper today, chisel tomorrow, treading on Wednesday, Spin on Thursday and Zumba on Friday.  That will entitle me to a helping of stuffing with gravy.

Here’s some morning music from Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings to get you started:

“The Shrill One” wins Nobel in Economics. Congratulations, Paul!

From the NYTimes:

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday….

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.” He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why. Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange different kinds of goods with each other; Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.

Well. I’m going to have to read his dissertation now.  Or not.  They don’t call Economics the “Dismal Science” for nothing. Can we assume the Nobel Committee is signaling that Uncle Miltie Friedman and his Chigago style economics aren’t as popular as they used to be?

We’ve had our differences with Paul lately but they have been relatively minor.  On the other hand, Princeton is fully in the grips of Obamamania.  Signs are littering too many yards.  Still, I think Paul only tepidly supports him.  (maybe)

Anyway, it’s a time to celebrate.  This calls for beers all around at The Triumph Brewery on Nassau Street.  Just let me know when, Paul.

Not too shabby for a Liberal.