Eyes tired straining at all those numbers in the Republican budget?
Suffering from outrage fatigue caused by corporate bonus babies, zombie banks and zombie Republicans?
Is even Keith Olbermann not enough to replenish your emotional batteries?
Then join us Thursday night, when we will once again Drink Liberally at the Bulkeley House, 111 Bank Street in New London. 6:30 PM sharp, or not so sharp.
Good drinks, good food and good conversation, not necessarily in that order.
This blog started year ago partly in reaction to George Bush’s attempt to “privatize” (read “destroy”) Social Security after he received a mandate to do so by never mentioning the subject during his 2004 campaign. Luckily, that didn’t work out so well, at least for George, and Social Security escaped his tender ministrations.
There were probably lots of reasons that Bush wanted to divert our money away from the Social Security program, but one, often remarked at the time, was that it would result in a staggering amount of money being dumped into the clutches of the Wall Street gamblers who have so effectively destroyed our economy. Had Bush has his way, they could have destroyed our futures as well as our present.
Josh Marshall note today that what the Bushies could not do with our Social Security money, the could do with the Pension Guaranty Fund, the government fund that is supposed to protect workers with pensions at companies that fail, or otherwise become incapable of fulfilling their obligations.
The Boston Globe reports that just before the markets tanked, the Bush appointee in charge of the Pension Guaranty Fund shifted its investments from low risk bonds to high risk stocks, hedge funds, and real estate and private equity funds. The Fund has lost a sizable percentage of its value, just when it will probably be needed as numerous companies collapse. As the Globe points out, this was an extremely stupid thing to do:
“The truth is, this could be huge,” said Zvi Bodie, a Boston University finance professor who in 2002 advised the agency to rely almost entirely on bonds. “This has the potential to be another several hundred billion dollars. If the auto companies go under, they have huge unfunded liabilities” in pension plans that would be passed on to the agency.
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… Bodie, the BU professor who advised the agency, questioned why a government entity that is supposed to be insuring pension funds should be investing in stocks and real estate at all. Bodie once likened the agency’s strategy to a company that insures against hurricane damage and then invests the premiums in beachfront property.Since he issued that warning, he said, the agency has gone even more aggressively into stocks, which he called “totally crazy.”
The genius behind this investment strategy was Charles E.F. Millard, a Bush appointee who defends his “strategy” by pointing out that in twenty years, it might all look pretty good. That ignores the fact, of course, that we might very well need the non-existent money now.
The fund is yet another governmentally established entity, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that is not entitled to full faith and credit. Nonetheless, the government will be under enormous pressure, this time justifiably so, to rescue it.
It may come as no surprise that in his former life, Millard was a former managing director at Lehman Brothers, where he undoubtedly learned all he had to know about making wise investments. He must have been like a kid in a candy store, drooling at the prospect of giving the money of the American worker away to his friends on Wall Street.
Lest we forget, this is what would have happened to Social Security, the only pension the affected workers may now have, if Bush had gotten his way. And, lest we also forget, it was not the politicians who stopped this raid on our money, it was the grassroots, including Marshall very prominently, who pushed the spineless Democrats into holding firm and not “compromising” with Bush, as so many of them (Lieberman especially) were wont to do.
One of the most irritating things that Democrats do is concede to the far right’s claim that Reagan was a great president. He was half senile even then. He catered to racists, and made war on the environment and the middle class. It’s good to see a little pushback.
Audrey Heard sent this link to me a few minutes ago. It has very little to do with politics. It’s written by her grandson, Sam Greenfield, brother of Jay Greenfield, who was an avid volunteer campaign worker in Groton a few years back. Sam is a junior at NYU, but this year he’s studying in Prague. He and two friends saw fit to take the Red Bull Challenge:
The team was Brett Morell, Will Lawton, and myself. Three juniors in college, studying together at New York University in Prague; one might say with stars in our eyes. The week-long challenge pitted 200 teams of three college students each in a rat race from one of five starting points (Rome, Madrid, Budapest, Manchester, or Berlin) to arrive in Paris, France on Halloween.
The challenge part consisted in the fact that the participants were allowed no money, credit cards or cell phones. All they started with was 24 cans of Red Bull, which they proceeded to barter for the wherewithal to make their way across Europe. At various milestones, their supply of Red Bull was replenished.
Since Sam is from Noank, and from a family of mostly good Democrats (I’m not sure about his Dad) it seemed like a good idea to give his piece a plug. There’s some very funny bits. Here’s the last section, at a point just after (this is just before the election) they had obtained some Obama paraphernalia from an American in Geneva, who was working on the Obama campaign. When they got to Lyons they put the Obama stuff to good use.
Random people on the streets, the Red Bull girls, our competition, they all loved the pins. They all loved Obama! A handful of French men and women tried to buy them off of us and we actually sold one for 8 euros. Amazing, as only Brett spoke patchy French, but at least we weren’t considered imperialist villains. And finally, the abilities of American iconography were put to the ultimate test.
We crossed the park from the Lyon checkpoint to the train station and let Obama do the real work. We found a conductor dressed in blues and explained our story. Of course, he loved our pins. Suddenly there were two conductors, three, now four TGV conductors dressed in their blue suits with black trim eagerly listening to the circumstances of our trip.
“Will you help us to Paris, today?” we pleaded.
They spoke in rapid-fire French, and then the dark-haired woman spoke.
“You will wait here for an hour. We will come back,” she instructed with a wink.
And in an hour she returned, grabbed one of the three trays in our possession and guided us out of the waiting lounge and down an escalator. It was on that descent I saw a crowd of nine TGV conductors and controllers talking and pointing. We approached the crowd, and a tall black man stepped towards us.
“Two can travel in front, one in back. Enjoy your trip.”
Quickly I looked over my shoulder, and couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the sight of a Hungarian CYMI team with their faces pressed up against the lounge’s glass window, jaws dropped, glaring in jealousy.
He began walking away in strict fashion, paused, and turned around. He pressed the palms of his hands together and said in broken English.
“We hope for Obama too. Pray for change.”
Red Bull Can You Make It?
Yes we can.
A few pictures from the Grand Opening of the City Democrats Headquarters Opening. First, by way of a reminder that next month the Town Democrats will be hosting a fundraiser to honor the two Nancys, DeMarinis and Driscoll, here they are with Ted Moukawsher:
While this picture doesn’t reflect it, the turnout was actually pretty good. Dick Blumenthal spoke, as did Nancy Wyman.
Finally, here’s Council Candidate Lisa Luck, with Dick Blumenthal
The City, as opposed to the Town, has been reliably Democratic. The Democrats have swept all the Council seats for several elections now, if I am not mistaken. The Republicans have fielded some strong candidates this year, but my money is on the Democrats to sweep again. Dennis Popp has been an excellent mayor.
Better late than never. I mean to put this up yesterday.
The Groton Democratic City Committee (as distinct from the Town Committee, for those of you not familiar with the labyrinthine nature of Groton government) will celebrate the opening of their election headquarters (City elections are in May) on Sunday, March 29th from 4 – 6 PM at the Boilermakers Union Hall, 33 Sacred Heart Dr., Groton. Nancy Wyman and Dick Blumenthal will be guest speakers. There will be refreshments and, of course, raffles.
Sports writers as a group seem to have a marked capacity for moral outrage. Witness, just as an example, Mike DiMauro’s column in today’s Day, in which he expresses a high degree of outrage about a recruiting violation at UConn, the precise details of which I don’t care to know. This is not unusual for DiMauro. His capacity for outrage is unlimited. Nor, as my introductory sentence points out, is DiMauro unique. In fact, I would venture to say he is fairly typical of that part of the Fourth Estate that covers sports. Steroids, doping, you name it, any form of sports cheating gets them going. Why, Mike Francesca and the Mad Dog even deigned to notice women’s basketball when given the chance to natter on about Nykesha Sales’ free basket. Not only are they able to summon up a high degree of outrage, but they see the world in absolutes, having little interest in shades of gray or in making allowances for human weakness, even when the individual involved is young, and perhaps entitled to a few screw ups.
To those of us more interested in those world events that really matter, this is quite frustrating, since it is a marked contrast to the media’s attitude, including that of most editorialists, toward things like torture and constitution shredding, about which the media reaction is most often a world weary shoulder shrugging, or an insistence on concentrating on superficialities.
Nor, unfortunately, is this skewed sense of moral outrage confined to the press. Barry Bonds is being prosecuted for perjury, as the hapless Roger Clemens may be, because they lied about the relatively trivial question of whether they used steroids. They have drawn the attention of both Congress and the Justice Department, both of which have been aggressively quiescent about the obvious perjury of Alberto Gonzales about an issue far more important to the nation.
Why is it that the media appears able to summon up outrage about the trivial world of sports when it is unable to do so about political events? Is there a qualitative difference between those who choose to cover sports and those that choose to cover reality? Maybe so. I often roll my eyes when reading purple prose like that which drips from DiMauro’s pen (today’s column is typical), but maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, the only person in the national media that has expressed the appropriate amount of outrage about the direction in which the Bush folks led this nation was Keith Olbermann, who is a former sportscaster. Maybe the sports minded are more revolted at the idea of cheating than those who choose to cover the more cynical world of politics. After all, a fundamental principle of most sports is an adherence to the rules, with consequences for those that stray. It’s an ethos that leads to outrage when the rules are broken. Maybe we need to draft more sports writers into the political side of things, so the moral outrage they are so capable of expressing can be directed at more appropriate targets.
I actually represented this guy many years ago. When he called me he told me he was Rick Derringer, expecting I would recognize the name, but it meant nothing to me (I don’t think I ever heard Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo), but I was mightily impressed when he told me he was the guy who did Hang on Sloopy (with the McCoys).
Several days ago I wondered whether we really needed the various financial instruments that have led us into the mess in which we currently find ourselves. I am, at best, merely a relatively well informed citizen, but it has always appeared to me that these instruments serve no useful purpose. They simply allow their creators to skim massive amounts of money out of our economic system, leaving us to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.
This morning, I was delighted to see that Paul Krugman, he of the Nobel Economics Prize, agrees:
Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.
But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.
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Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.
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As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.
Alas, it seems only too true that Geither’s objective (and therefore Obama’s) is to return us to the status quo ante. If they are successful that merely means that at some point in the not too distant future we will return to the just plain status quo. Undoubtedly, had McCain been elected, he would have sought to do the same, but that is scant solace. The truth is that it is always a mistake to bring in an insider to reform any system; only the most singular of insiders can avoid buying in to the assumptions of the group. Geither is clearly not a singular individual. It’s as if Franklin Roosevelt had dedicated the New Deal to restoring the excesses of the 20′s.