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Deja vu all over again

Saturday, August 18, 2007

While wandering through the blogosphere I came across this post at Down with Tyranny in which Howie Klein discusses the recent spate of official factfinding visits to Iraq, during which the visitor is squired around the green zone and fed a line of bull by the military. These folks, most of them already war supporters, come back to tell us that things are going swimmingly. Some might say (though no one will) that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As Yogi said, it’s deja vu all over again. Those of us who watched the Vietnam War from start to finish will recall that the same sort of thing happened during Vietnam. George Romney, Mitt’s father, famously complained that he had been brainwashed on one such trip. Things haven’t changed much. Having made the fatal mistake of telling the truth, albeit somewhat awkwardly, his political career was destroyed.

Of course, the brainwashing techniques were cruder then, and far less effective than those used today. Another advantage today’s brainwashers have is that the brains being washed are far smaller and most of them come pre-washed, having already learned to fiercely believe more impossible things than even the Red Queen could manage.

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No good deed goes unpunished

Friday, August 17, 2007

This was the last day of my vacation, and I celebrated in fine fashion.

Often, when I am out bike riding, I come upon a turtle crossing the road, and I alway stop and carry it to the other side, so as to avoid squashed turtle. I have always done this without mishap, but those were Connecticut turtles. Today’s turtle was of a different sort. Connecticut turtles generally wiggle a bit and retreat into their shells. This particular Vermont turtle (8 to 10 inches in diameter) did not take kindly to being saved. I actually got him to the other side of the rode without a problem, but he immediately turned himself around, so I attempted to point him in the general direction of safety.

That turned out to be a mistake. Within a short time he had a goodly piece of what the doctors later called my right forearm. In fact, he had such a good grip that he was hanging in the air from my arm, something like a very large, turtle shaped Christmas ornament hanging off a tree. My wife later said that I should have taken a picture, but oddly enough it never occured to me to do so. I did, however, have the presence of mind to get the turtle detached from my arm.

Prudence dictated that I seek medical help. Emergency rooms are few and far between in Vermont, so it took me several hours to get to Bennington, where I proceeded to wait for several more hours for a tetanus shot and a verdict on whether I needed stitches. As it turned out, the answer was no. I did, however, learn from my fellow patients in the ER that I was lucky not to lose a finger, it was probably a snapping turtle, and they make darned good eating. I also learned several theories about the proper way to carry a turtle or otherwise move one across the road. My technique was to hold the turtle on both sides toward the rear. The fellow next to me said you can grab them by the tail; someone else said there is a particular portion of the shell you can press which temporarily paralyzes them (I’m dubious about that one), others suggested prodding with a stick. Everyone seemed to agree that it was awfully funny that I was there because I was bitten by a turtle.

So, I spent the last day of my vacation in the ER because I tried to help a turtle. All clouds have silver linings-despite the wait I must say the folks in the hospital we’re quite nice. The doctor especially was incredibly friendly, even after he found out I was a lawyer.

Tomorrow it’s back to Connecticut and back to reality. But I will have a permanent souvenier of this year’s vacation on my right forearm.

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The limits of term limits

Thursday, August 16, 2007

In what can only be considered a precursor to an attempt to establish a Castro like dictatorship, Hugo Chavez is moving toward amending Venezuela’s Constitution to remove a term limit restriction which present prevents him from serving as President for life. It appears that the chances are good that he’ll get what he wants. No doubt there will be howls of protests from Republicans here, who will rightfully see it for what it is. Unfortunately, to a large extent, it’s a case of pots and kettles.

In this country we have seen a pattern of deification of Republican presidents by their followers, with talk, while they are in office, or relieving them from the two term limit that the Republicans passed in reaction to Roosevelt. We see the deification in the persistent attempts to add them to Mount Rushmore. There was talk at one point of putting Nixon up there, and persistent talk of adding Reagan. As I recall, that talk was scotched only when someone from the Park Service testified that there was no room for another president. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone that they could transform say, Jefferson, into Reagan.

There was also talk of lifting the term limit restriction for Reagan, something he supported (allegedly for future presidents only). I invite consideration of an alternate world in which Bush’s unholy foray into Iraq had succeeded. The Republicans so eager to keep their distance now would be beating the drum to allow the man who would be dictator to continue to “serve”. The only thing that has saved us from that sorry fate is Bush’s utter incompetence, something from which Chavez apparently does not suffer. Even as it is, we have the hallmarks of at least a temporary dictatorship in Bush’s recent behavior, e.g., executive privilege for anyone connected with Bush, See, again e.g., the Republican National Committee’s recent refusal to comply with a subpoena from Congress because the White House might make the utterly bogus claim that documents in its possession are subject to executive privilege. That claim, if allowed by our compliant courts, would effectively condone the merger of a political party with the government (good only when the president is Republican), something that Bush has already done in practice. It would also effectively enable a president to immunize anyone and everyone from Congressional scrutiny.

We’ve avoided, so far, Venezuela’s coming fate, but there’s no reason to think we are immune. Bush’s abuses will harden into precedents, ready for re-use by the next Republican president. The two-term limit will be scant protection from the ever encroaching Republican executive. Yet another reason why the Democrats must come up with a way to strike back at Bush while he is still in office. The most effective way would seem to be the use of the inherent contempt power to put Karl and Harriet in jail. They don’t need any Republican help to take that step.

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Were Number 42!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

In a recent post I passed on the view of the Economist that the United States was ranked number 17 in the standings of Democratic countries. Given the number of countries in the world, that still gave us a chance to make the playoffs, but it is still somewhat dispiriting to know you’re trailing Malta and Spain.

We could take some solace from the fact that any such ranking is necessarily subjective, sort of like the college rankings, which consistently fail to give my own alma mater the number one ranking it deserves.

But today, I must report on a far more objective ranking, which ranks not our freedom, but our longevity. We Americans are living longer, but not as long as folks in 40 other countries. That’s right, we’re number 42 in the rankings. Not only are we low in the standings, we have been plummeting faster than the Red Sox in August. Just 20 years ago, we were in eleventh place.

Countries that surpass the United States include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

All is not lost, we are ahead of a heck of a lot of countries.

The shortest life expectancies were clustered in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by HIV and AIDS, famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.

On the other hand, while Americans may not expect to live as long as other people, they are probably number one in the amount of time they can expect to spend working in the time they do have on this earth. Perhaps we should adopt a national motto, something of a melding of that of the State of New Hampshire and the Vulcan greeting: “Work Long and Die”.

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Insuring the rich stay rich

Monday, August 13, 2007

Must reading by Dean Baker at Truthout (Welfare as We Know It Now):

In the days before welfare reform, single mothers could collect five or six hundred dollars a month without working. That was what welfare looked like before 1996. In the Internet Age, welfare is about having the government do everything it can to make the rich absolutely as rich as possible.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said many years ago, the rich are not like you or me: They need the government’s assistance to get by. There are all sorts of ways in which the government helps those who have the most.

…

At the moment, many of the high-flying hedge fund boys and girls find themselves in trouble because they invested heavily in subprime mortgages and other risky assets. With the housing bubble starting to deflate, some of these assets are nearly worthless and many are worth far less than what the hedge funds paid.

Hedge funds make big returns by making highly leveraged investments, meaning they borrow heavily to multiply their gains. The flip side in this story is that when the hedge funds bet wrong, they can lose much of their capital very quickly.

The hedge fund crew is desperately hoping the Federal Reserve Board will swoop in to save the day. Most immediately, they need lower interest rates. The hedge funds can only hang onto their assets as long as they can pay interest on the money they borrow. If interest rates fall, then an important source of pressure will be relieved.

Next, they need some sucker on whom they can dump their bad mortgages. The best candidates are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These government-backed firms created the secondary market in mortgage debt that allows banks to sell the mortgages they issue. It turns out the hedge funds have been big players in the secondary market, buying up hundreds of billions in mortgage debt that is going bad at a very rapid rate. The hedge fund boys will be lobbying Congress big-time to broaden the role of Fannie and Freddie so they can buy this bad debt and save them from large losses.

 With the Fed lowering interest rates and Fannie and Freddie buying up their junk bonds, the hedge fund managers may be able to make it through the housing market crash relatively unscathed. It might take a lot of help from the government to ensure their fortunes, but the rich are different from you and me.

This, by the way, is not an exclusively Republican response to the pain of the rich. When it comes to insuring that the rich stay rich, the Democrats are almost as zealous as the Republicans

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Nice work if you can get it

Monday, August 13, 2007

I don’t know the precise hole into which Karl Rove will now crawl, but one candidate, at least as a sideline, is the scam in which Linda Chavez, Reagan’s (and Bush’s proposed) Hispanic conservative is currently engaged. According to the Washington Post, she and her equally loathsome husband run three PACs, which have soaked over $24 million dollars from right wing nutjobs while spending approximately 1.5% of that in what could possibly be called political activities. The rest went into salaries for family members and more fundraising. Despite all the evidence, it appears that Chavez is not intentionally working for the Democrats.

“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.

And what a business. They needed to do something different, since they couldn’t seem to make honest work pay:

The family took a break from politics when Bill Clinton was elected president, briefly operating a Mexican restaurant in Gaithersburg called the Santa Fe Express, with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night. The restaurant went broke.

At that point, Chavez’s husband told the Post, they discovered the wonderful world of scamming right wing dupes. Well, he didn’t put it quite that way, but basically that’s what happened.

Considering the small amount of money actually spent productively, you might think that Chavez would at least know where it went, but…not so much:

The Latino Alliance, for instance, “did lots of telephone calls in the 2004 elections,” she said. “I believe we did some radio ads. We did outreach into the Latino communities to try and mobilize more pro-Republican votes.” (Emphasis added)

It would be wonderful if Karl decided to spend the next few years running his very own Chavez style PAC. Given his god like status with the GOP base, he could probably siphon off 10 times what Chavez is able to raise.

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Losing in Afghanistan

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Interesting article in the Times this morning about the failure in Afghanistan (you expected something else from these folks?). It contains the usual litany of failures, incompetence and faith based governance. Nothing new there.

I found two things interesting. One was the fact that almost all of the sources were on the record. Apparently the fear that the Bush machine inspired in the early going has dissipated. Bush may have the Democrats cowed, but no one else seems frightened.

The second thing that struck me was this:

Despite warnings about the Taliban’s resurgence from Mr. Neumann, Mr. Khalilzad and military officials, Ms. Rice said, “there was no doubt that people were surprised that the Taliban was able to regroup and come back in a large, well-organized force.”

Poor Condi has a knack for pleading that the foreseeable is unforseeable. No one could have predicted that people would use planes as weapons, no one had any idea that the Niger weapons claims were overblown, and no one had any idea that the Taliban might regroup. Except the experts, but who listens to them?

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This and that from Vermont

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Internet access has been more sporadic than usual this year, accounting for the small number of posts I have inflicted on the world recently. The lack of access, combined with the fact that we haven’t been buying newspapers, means that I am blissfully unaware of the bad news that I am sure is filling the papers.

So I have nothing to say, but I do have a few pictures. First, from Pawlet, Vermont this picture of an artist’s studio. The last time we visited, it was adorned with Albert Einstein’s visage, which I believe I may have put up on my old blog. The artist told us that he changes the faces periodically. The have included, inter alia and in addition to Einstein, Bernie Sanders and Don Knotts. Next up, at least according to plan, is Hillary Clinton. He said he doesn’t necessarily support her, but she has an interesting face. At present, as you can see, it’s Willie Nelson

I would have preferred to show a bit of context, but there was a car parked right next to the studio that marred the view.

Here’s a typical Vermont scene.

And here’s a truism found at the entrance to Vermont’s finest book store, the Northshire in Manchester:

As I said, I haven’t been able to keep up with much, but I see from one of my widgets that the Red Sox are busily squandering their lead. The question now is whether they’ll still be in first place by the time I get home. Ah well, these things build character, which is why New England has so many characters.

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Bigger houses for flatter incomes

Friday, August 10, 2007

According to CNN, there is talk in Congress about bailing out the mortgage industry.

Of course, all the talk is about directing help toward the crooks and liars who created the crisis in the first place; the homeowners who were suckered into borrowing too much money will get nothing. What I found sort of unbelievable was this:

Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac] have a Federal charter that requires them to provide liquidity and stability to the mortgage market. However, those organizations made it clear on Friday that any help will be limited.

…

Freddie has pledged to invest $20 billion in new subprime mortgage products. However those loans have to meet much stricter underwriting standards. (emphasis added)

I’m not an economist, so maybe I’m being simplistic. Still, it seems to me that there is no reason to have or encourage a subprime market, which by definition involves extensions of credit to people who are unlikely to be able to repay the money they are borrowing, all predicated on the belief that housing prices will rise indefinitely. For the most part these borrowers are not deadbeats, they are people who are borrowing more than they can’t afford to repay.

What would happen if these people could not get these ill-advised loans? If there are enough of them, then their withdrawal from the housing market would result in a lessening of demand for houses at the prices currently being asked. The laws of supply and demand (unless they’ve been repealed) would seem to indicate that existing home prices would fall until those same people, or many of them, could buy homes that they could afford. This would mean that a lot of people who currently own homes would not be able to realize huge capital gains when they sell, but they do not have a constitutional right to such gains, and in any event it is impossible to sustain ever rising home prices in the face of stagnant real income. If we want stable increases in home prices we need stable increases in median incomes, something we haven’t seen in a long time. As it is, the subprime lending market appears to function more as an artificial price support system for real property, than as a necessary lending mechanism for people with bad credit. This particular housing bubble has burst, and the inevitable damage is being done. The question is whether we want to allow a repetition, by allowing or encouraging subprime lending in the future.

It could be argued, possibly, that there is a natural floor for housing prices, which can’t go lower than the cost of building homes. Perhaps the cost of building a home would price the subprime borrower out of the market completely. I don’t know if that argument would have merit, but if it does it assumes that every house we build must be of the McMansion type that is now the norm. Perhaps if we imposed some sanity on credit markets it would have the salutary side effect of encouraging the building of reasonably sized and priced homes.This trend toward ever larger homes has taken a toll on Americans, who feel it necessary to keep up with their own perception of how rich they should be. This Sunday’s Times carried a Book Review of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class by Robert Frank, in which the reviewer notes:

… Between 1949 and 1979, the rising tide of the American economy lifted all boats more or less equally. In fact, the incomes of the bottom 80 percent grew more rapidly than the incomes of the top 1 percent, and those of the bottom 20 percent grew most rapidly of all. But since 1979, gains have flowed disproportionately to top earners. In an economy where the wealthy set the norms for consumption and people at every rung strain to maintain the consumption of those just above them, that spells trouble. In today’s arms race, the top 1 percent are armed to the teeth and everybody else is scavenging for ammunition. Between 1980 and 2001, Frank notes, the median size of new homes in the United States rose from 1,600 to 2,100 square feet, “despite the fact that the median family’s real income had changed little in the intervening years.” The end result? Frank methodically presents data showing that the typical American now works more, saves less, commutes longer and borrows more to maintain what he or she views as an appropriate standard of living.

The subprime borrower is, oftentimes, a person who would be perfectly prime if he or she were buying a home that was reasonably priced or reasonably sized (If not, then the individual is so far below prime they should not be buying a house). If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac feel it is government policy to support the subprime market they are doing the subprime borrower no great favor, but they are enabling the scammers and contributing to an unhealthy spiral of rising home prices in a country with flat income growth.

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Truth in the Internet age

Thursday, August 9, 2007

While perusing the Boston Globe yesterday, I came across this article in the Business Section, about the latest doings at Fidelity Investments, in which, truth to tell, I have zero interest. Nonetheless, I was struck by this paragraph:

Ned Johnson, the visionary who built Fidelity Investments into the nation’s largest mutual fund company, has long been a believer in the Japanese workplace philosophy of “kaizen,” which emphasizes constant change as a way to improve efficiency. He is certainly familiar with this old Japanese proverb: The fish rots from the head down (Emphasis added)

Certainly the proverb is quite true, as Bush is proving about the American fish. However, the attribution of the proverb to the Japanese drew me up short, for I immediately and accurately recalled that Michael Dukakis has accurately observed that the Reagan-Bush Adminstration was demonstrating the proverb’s truth in 1988, yet he, as I again accurately recalled, attributed it to his Greek ancestors. A quick Google search revealed no attributions to the Japanese, but two attributions to the Russians, one by a self proclaimed Russian, and one by a presumed non-Russian. A seach for “fish rots from head down source” reveals this enticiing link, which appears to support Dukakis and appears to rely on an authoritative source (MacMillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Famous Phrases), but alas, when one clicks one finds that one must pay to read the entire article. Lastly, here we find a claim that it is an old Chinese proverb.

Where does the truth lie? My money’s on the Greeks, but that’s a mere guess. The Japanese do not appear to be in the running, so one must wonder what source the Globe reporter relied upon to make the assertion that he did. A minor matter, perhaps, but a bit troubling if, as one suspects, he shaped the facts to fit the storyline.

Of course, in this internet age, truth can sometimes be a rather slippery thing. Will the next person googling the phrase rely on the Globe article to conclude that the phrase indeed originated with the Japanese?

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