The End Is Always Nearer on the Right Side of the Street

A friend sent me a link received in one of those multi-forwarded, zombie right-wing chain mails that spammers use for harvesting emails for their lists. The email was headed, "Obama to sign away US freedom in December?"

With the forward came this plaintive request:

Please give me your opinion on this fellow - and give me some material to shoot back to the idiots sending it to me
pleeeeeease!

The link (which I won't bother to embed) is to a YouTube clip of one Lord Christopher Monckton, a former Maggie Thatcher advisor and climate change skeptic, speaking before a Minnesota Free Market Institute meeting in mid-October.

There's a climate change treaty to be signed in Copenhagen this December. "In the next few weeks," says Monckton, "unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away for ever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again."

The end is near. Again.

Exaspberated, I replied (tongue firmly in cheek):

But, but, but ... he's melodramatic. He has a classy British accent. He quoted Churchill. He kisses our American asses and says he "so loves and admires" us. He can't be a kook, can he?

Now, you thought they thought Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and defeated communism, and, being a Thatcherite, surely Monckton does. Au contraire! Monckton said Obama will sign our freedom away to a "communist world government" and once done, it cannot be undone. OMG!

Okay, there is that bit about the Congress having to ratify treaties, what with all their pages and pages of exemptions, but why should we let that minor detail get in the way of some good, old-fashioned conservative red baiting?

I mean, it's like that time in 1988 when that pinko Ronald Reagan sold out the the ol' US of A by signing the UN Convention Against Torture (the one Congress didn't ratify until 1994?). That commie rat bastard Reagan signed away America's sovereign, God-given right to torture people! We could have used torture against those Islamofascist bastards, al Qaida, ya know?

But NOOOOO!!!! The UN stopped us dead in our tracks, didn't it?

I, too, think of the US of A as the beacon of freedom to the world. I'm just relieved, as Monckton must be, that even after all that leftist propaganda about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that the world still sees us as he does, as the beacon of freedom. Now if we can only stop those lefties from keeping Miami Beach real estate from slipping beneath the waves like the Hood.

Sorry if I'm just all alarmist-out, but after a decade of the-end-is-near rhetoric from the right, I'm afraid I can hardly muster a yawn.

Do these people bathe in fear because they can't get an erection any more, and a chill up their spines is as good as it gets?

Other than that, she was probably a swell gal

SC Gov. Mark Sanford doesn't know enough to quit while he's behind. He's in Newsweek with a review of some new books about the life of Ayn Rand. Sanford's takeaway? "Government doesn't know best."

Whoa.

Sanford pauses in his paean to Rand long enough to acknowledge that her freedom fetish did not apply to members of her cult:

Ironically, as Heller's biography makes clear, while Rand's philosophy was based on the individual's absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own... For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn't allow much of it around her.

Sanford doesn't mention (and may not know) that Rand based one of her early fictional heroes on William Edward Hickman, who author Michael Prescott describes as "a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. Other than that, he was probably a swell guy."

Prescott continues:

According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

The free-spirited Hickman kidnapped, held for ransom and dismembered a twelve year-old girl, after which the throw-social-convention-to-the-wind sprite threw her body parts out the door of his car.

Yeah, he was an axe murderer, but that wasn't what impressed Rand, but his personal credo, "what is good for me is right." As she writes in her journals:

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, a real man.

And Rand? Yeah, she was a sociopath, but that's not what impresses Gov. Mark Sanford. Rand's "one more major flaw" was that her sociopathy led her to her reject conventional Christian morality. But interpreting Atlas Shrugged as parable about limited government makes Rand "more relevant than ever."

Thus endeth Sanford's high school book report. A lot of people read Atlas Shrugged in high school. Most of them grow up.

Hide The Pseudoephed - Wall Street's Back At It

A severely anorexic friend once had her heart stop beating in church. A heart specialist at the service got her going again, but they had to jump-start her twice again on the way to Mission.

She'd recently taken to sucking on a Big Gulp cup of water all day. Flushed all her electrolytes. The hospital had never seen readings that low. But she was no longer using laxatives, she rationalized. That meant she was in recovery.

So what do we make of our friends on Wall Street and their new Big Gulp? Sunday's New York Times explains:

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier policyholders die, the more investors ... reap?

If my wife had been drinking, she'd have done a spit-take. "What sick f***s would buy these?" she exclaimed. Or think them up?

But thank heavens, they've stopped bundling mortgages.

This behavior is like a gambling or meth addiction. It's not even about the money any more. Wall Street doesn't need bailouts. It needs rehab and a priest.

Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.

Back to Boise

Today I finally looked back in on Bill Cope of Boise Weekly. A few weeks ago, I saw where Cope had ventured into the mountains to get some insight on socialist health care from "Badger" Bob, the socialist. Bob is both a capitalist libertarian and a socialist, so he ought to know socialism when he sees it. Bill found Bob drinking pitchers of Oly and throwing horseshoes with his buddy, Hoot, "a straight-up libertarian."

Things got a little heated:

"Tell me something, Hoot. Were you so damned confident in the free markets back when Enron was kicking the crap out of California by manipulating the energy grid? Or how about when we found out that Halliburton bunch was screwing the military out of billions? Did that make you proud of your unfettered laissez faire? Huh? Or what we're going through now with all these damn banks and such? ... Doesn't that make you wonder even a little bit if unregulated commerce ain't entirely what it's cracked up to be? You really suppose this is what your precious Adam Smith had in mind?"

If you look further, Cope explains the common medical condition, HUHA.

Something I ran across

As for the argument that government is unable to pull off anything like health care successfully, Steve Benen at Washington Monthly recalled a memorable scene from film:

It reminds me a bit of a scene in “Life of Brian.” The People’s Front of Judea are having a meeting and considering what the Romans had ever done for them. Reg asks, “Apart apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Bailout Bank Banks Bucks

Goldman Sachs rakes in billions:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. set aside a record $11.4 billion for compensation and benefits in the first half of 2009, up 33 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $386,429 for the period.

The figures were released today with the firm’s record second-quarter earnings results. Revenue jumped 31 percent to $23.19 billion in the first half and the New York-based firm set aside 49 percent to cover its largest expense, compensation and benefits.

But here in downtown Charlotte, the banking center of the South, things aren't so rosy:

Just as first-time claims for unemployment insurance surged in the sour economy, final payments – made when laid-off workers have exhausted their initial benefits and all extensions – are climbing, with Mecklenburg County numbers more than double from a year ago.

[...]

Relief, in the form of new jobs, doesn't appear imminent, based on the latest labor statistics. The national unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent in June, a 26-year high, with companies cutting 467,000 jobs – more than economists expected. Charlotte-area unemployment has outpaced the nation, reaching 12 percent in May. Economists expect both numbers to rise further before the end of the year.

Last month, the number of Mecklenburg County residents who ran out of unemployment benefits climbed to nearly 2,900 – the fourth straight month above 2,000 and more than double the number of people in June 2008, according to new data from the N.C. Employment Security Commission. Before the recession, the number of final payments in a single month never topped 2,000.

I'm just lucky to have a job again.

Still, I'm thinking of The Mouse That Roared for some reason.

Setting a new tone

A friend put me on to this article in the New Yorker that explores how "the culture of money" among doctor who see themselves as entrepreneurs led to the overuse of medicine and significantly higher costs in McAllen, TX.

But I was struck by this paragraph about how key employers set the cultural tone for business in some areas:

Woody Powell is a Stanford sociologist who studies the economic culture of cities. Recently, he and his research team studied why certain regions—Boston, San Francisco, San Diego—became leaders in biotechnology while others with a similar concentration of scientific and corporate talent—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York—did not. The answer they found was what Powell describes as the anchor-tenant theory of economic development. Just as an anchor store will define the character of a mall, anchor tenants in biotechnology, whether it’s a company like Genentech, in South San Francisco, or a university like M.I.T., in Cambridge, define the character of an economic community. They set the norms. The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not.

A friend observes the same thing about cities like Seattle. Where once it was Boeing, now Microsoft sets the economic tone.

Living in Western North Carolina with a withered textile/furniture manufacturing base - one that sorely needs reviving - the idea of attracting anchor-tenants as a way of setting a new tone for manufacturing investment deserves attention.

Greenville, SC had seen its textile-based economy wither in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building on the strength of the statewide technical school system, Democatic Governor John C. West lured Michelin Tire Company to Greenville, SC in the early 1970s, "anchoring" the area's transition to a mixed manufacturing economy. Republican Governor Carroll Campbell built on that momentum in attracting BMW and Fuji Film to the area in the late 1980s.

Downtown Greenville, SC was boarded up and dying in the 1970s when Mayor Max Heller began promoting his plan to narrow Main Street, widen sidewalks and create a European-style downtown.



Heller convinced Hyatt to locate a new hotel at the north end of Main Street (rather than on a nearby interstate highway) to "anchor" the downtown redevelopment and set a tone that downtown was a place to invest. Decades later, downtown is thriving, lined with shops, restaurants and outdoor cafes. In the most Republican area of South Carolina, in downtown Greenville there stands a bronze statue of Austrian Jewish refugee, and Democrat, Max Heller.





The anchor-tenant concept could be used to revive manufacturing in Asheville/Buncombe. What name-brand company do we want to attract as an anchor-tenant?

No more choo-choo?

"The gravy train has got to stop," - Royal Dutch Shell investor

Shareholders voted against approving the executive pay policies of Royal Dutch Shell on Tuesday, giving the energy company a clear signal it had not done enough to address remuneration concerns that dominated proceedings at its annual meeting for a second year.
- Financial Times

In a sign that the public may finally be calling corporations to heel, several investor groups have been pressuring corporate boards on executive pay, at least in Europe, the Financial Times reports:

Xstrata suffered a stinging protest by shareholders over its pay policies on Tuesday as more than a third of votes cast on its remuneration report at its annual meeting failed to back it.

BP experienced a similar protest vote against its remuneration plan last month and pay is expected to be a contentious issue at Shell’s annual meeting this month.

“The turnout at meetings is higher, and a much higher level of votes is being cast against remuneration proposals in a number of countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden,” says Jean-Nicolas Caprasse, head of proxy voting agency RiskMetrics European and Middle Eastern business.

Europe in recent months has seen revolts in the Netherlands (Heineken, ASML, KPN) and Sweden (Volvo, Nordea). The past few weeks have seen that mood take hold in Britain.

“Remuneration is the number one subject in the UK and Europe”, says Mr Caprasse. “One thing shareholders agree is that they don’t want to reward failure and they’ve seen a lot of failure in the past year. It has united shareholders’ focus.”

Bank of America investors last month scored a small victory by deposing Ken Lewis as CEO. Perhaps it is because the economic wreckage is worse in Europe that investors across the pond have done more to date than American shareholders. Stay tuned.

Losing sight

from Atlantic:

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

As a former government regulator told me, you had people who wanted nothing more from their job than to be the good cop ... and then you had those who always wanted to be something else. They wanted to be one of the Big Money Boys. And they lost sight of who they served and what it was they were hired to do.

Behold AIG

Four years ago, I wrote a column describing the modern corporation as a science-fiction monster – an artificial life form neither biological nor technological, but legal, a soulless creation possessing only appetite and instinct. Behold AIG.

Friday, the New York Times reported that the insurance giant is suing the U.S. government for $306 million. After receiving almost $200 billion from U.S. taxpayers to keep it from collapsing, AIG has taken legal action against its benefactors – us – who hold an 80% stake in the company. All this while sparking national outrage by paying bailout-funded bonuses totaling $165 million to some of the same avaricious jerks that brought our economy to its knees.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Unserious

Here on the left, we're shrill. We're unhinged. Amateurs. Unpatriotic. For eight years we warned America about war crimes, torture, rendition, phony intelligence, domestic surveillance, insider deals, greed, corruption and the gutting of the Constitution. We can't be taken seriously. Not like the professionals.

Not like these guys:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

[h/t Scrutiny Hooligans]

Less Than Stimulating

When President Obama warned Republicans last week not to "come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis," one idea he may have had in mind is a second American Jobs Creation Act. The GOP proposal was rejected in the Senate last week, but lives on in conservative rhetoric.

The first AJCA, enacted under President Bush in 2004, allowed corporations with offshore profits to repatriate them at a steep tax discount – virtually a tax holiday. Like many conservative tax giveaways, the AJCA was supposed to create jobs and boost the economy. There were doubters.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Re: Stimulus Package

I want a better bill with more capital spending. One thing you'll notice in this debate, however, is that critics want more capital spending in the mix (infrastructure,etc.), but none of them offer a shopping list. Why not?

I have a feeling that the folks in the White House aren't fools. If there were more "shovel ready" projects out there, they'd be in the bill.

And if there were more non-shovel-ready projects proposed in the package, critics would complain that they are "not stimulative" because they take too long to get money into the economy. (Remember, big projects are what I do, and they take 12-18 months to go from proposal to "shovel ready.") Yes, the bill isn't anywhere near perfect. Things this size never are. Obama's efforts are also suffering from the mistrust engendered by the previous administration's efforts.

One of the things economists fear is that the spending won't be large enough to jump start the economy. My feeling is that Congress put in as many "good" projects as they could find and then filled it out with other stuff to ensure the spending was as immediate enough and large enough to meet the threshhold needed, warts and all. I saw the WS Journal article listing most of the bill as "pork" and "not stimulative." But phrases like "loaded with pork" or else "not stimulative" aren't terribly descriptive. Anything that's not a tax cut, is pork to Republicans. Where's their alternative? I mean, to more tax cuts? Where's their shopping list?

As I said over at Scrutiny Holligans, it's a bit like getting babies to eat their vegetables, isn’t it?

Standing Athwart Recovery

Conservatives are never ready to stand athwart history, yelling Stop when faced with sending troops to war or bailing out a financial system they destroyed. But when it comes to government spending that might help out ordinary people they consider bad apples, conservatives go all Jack Benny and complain, "I'm thinking it over!"

On the economic stimulus package, they’re thinking it over.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Rough Weather Ahead

From Rep. Heath Shuler's (D-NC) district, in a state with unemployment already above the national average:

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Thousands of people flocked to a western North Carolina job fair this week, backing up traffic on an interstate ramp and more doubling the number of job seekers who came last year.

The Asheville Citizen-Times reported Wednesday that about 2,000 people attended the job fair Tuesday to talk to some of the 56 employers who participated. Last year, about 800 people attended.

This morning ABC radio news and AP (above) reported on it. Photos here. Video here.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

“You Have Bad Luck”

It's an article of faith among free-marketeers that Americans are overregulated. But most Americans have forgotten what freedom from regulation really looks like.

The Washington Post details the foot dragging and stonewalling of safety enforcement at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 2001. The Bush administration took a somewhat different view of the agency’s mission.

The agency's first director under Bush, John L. Henshaw, startled career officials by telling them in an early meeting that employers were OSHA's real customers, not the nation's workers. "Everybody was pretty amazed," one of those present recalled. "Our purpose is to ensure employee safety and health. . . . He just looked at things differently."

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Business Week's Top Ten Worst Predictions of 2008

The Worst Predictions About 2008

10. A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, the title of a book by conservative commentator Shelby Steele, published on Dec. 4, 2007.

Mr. Steele, meet President-elect Barack Obama.

The House that Jack Bought

The Agonist primer on the financial meltdown.

Read it before you hear about in on the Nightly Business Report

Every Time a Bell Rings

A Wall Street executive gets a bonus.

Plus a little toxic waste:

(Fortune) -- Kudos to Credit Suisse. Drowning in red ink, the Swiss bank announced it would pay bonuses to senior investment bankers not with cash but with mortgage-backed securities, high-yield bonds, and other forms of the untradeable junk now clogging the world's banking system.

Reportedly, investment bankers at the firm are steaming mad over the plan, but we think the idea is ingenious. After all, if these toxic securities were good enough for Credit Suisse's customers, they should be good enough for the bankers who cooked them up too. Don't you think?

[h/t Terrance Heath at Campaign for America's Future]

"The Mouse That Roared" was a satire

This is simply insane (from Bloomberg):

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.

The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.

[. . .]

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern.

“This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” Doggett said. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

Remember "government of the people, by the people, for the people"? Me neither.